I flew to San Diego in April for PCA/ACA, a national conference for well… pop culture (and American culture apparently). I’m going to do another “Stitch’s Stuff” post on the conference itself, but this one’s about San Diego.

Prior to April of this year, the farthest away I’d been from my home in South Florida was New York. When I was eleven or twelve, my parents and I took a Greyhound bus all the way from Miami up to visit my family in the Bronx. It’s almost 1300 miles.

This year, I flew almost twice that distance to get to San Diego with my darling friend Katelynn at my side.

The thing about San Diego is that it kind of looks a lot like Miami.

It’s very… beachy, at least where we were for the conference, and it was like a chillier Miami.

That had hills.

I think that the hills and the fact that there were dogs literally everywhere were the most disconcerting part of straight up being in San Diego.

Despite the fact that we were maybe ten or fifteen minutes away from the San Diego Zoo and a whole host of totally touristy activities, we basically lived in the hotel. We were at that bar so often that they could’ve probably made a Cheers parody out of recording us work on our presentations for the conference or on school work for the semester.

Like I could’ve lived at the bar forever. That’s how good either food was (I was out there having prime rib sandwiches all the dang time).

We (which includes our friend Lauren who met us at the hotel and was our third Musketeer) also did a pub crawl the night before we left and hit up basically most of the cheap-o bars in the area. I have photographs of all the drinks I drank and (maybe) some of the food I ate.

I have literally dreamt of the breakfast bacon mac and cheese that I had at Breakfast Republic with Katelynn and our friend Rukmini before we headed off on our respective flights. It was basically THE BEST mac and cheese (and y’all know how picky I am about mac and cheese…)

I loved the conference experience and getting to literally rant about how annoying racists in fandom are, but like…

My favorite thing about San Diego had to be the food.

I mean yes, that’s basically 90% of what I was exposed to for the most part. We didn’t do anything seriously touristy because it was expensive and while the food wasn’t cheap, we’d all budgeted for our big appetites.

Hell, at one point before all of the family financial trouble this semester, I was actually considering flying back to San Diego for a few days just so I could hang out at the hotel and eat my way around the city. I seriously thought about it.

But you know… that didn’t happen.

Who knows though, while the next PCA/ACA is in Indiana, there’s always a chance that I’ll get to visit San Diego once more (and eat all the things).

It was a fantastic traveling experience and I hope to have many more next year!