Anne Appert Illustration: Road Trip Part 1: San Diego!

Hello again!

It's time to tell you all a bit more about my trip! After the wedding, we decided to stay for a few days in San Diego so we could see the sights there. The first day, we went to Balboa Park. What a beautiful park! Balboa Park is where the zoo and a lot of museums are in San Diego.

First, we went to the art museum. Every time my sister and I travel to a new city, I drag her along to the art museum. (She likes museums too, but I do limit myself to 2 hours in a museum so she doesn’t get bored out of her mind!). The museum was nice. I think it was a bit overpriced for it’s size, but I am a Jersey girl and spoiled by the MET. It was pretty small, you wouldn’t need two hours to see the entire museum. Granted, we only ever look at the exhibits we are interested in, and that didn’t take long. There was an exhibit of Joaquin Sorolla’s paintings and drawings that I really liked. He was an artist I hadn’t heard of before, so it was worth going just to be introduced to some new art that inspired me. He drew on location in gouache, and his drawings of New York were amazing. He really managed to capture the busy bustle of it with just a few loose strokes. I loved them, but of course, I wasn’t allowed to take pictures in the exhibit and they didn’t have any postcards of the art I liked. His paintings were beautiful too.

Me! In front of the art museum

After that exhibit though, we were done at the museum and made our way across the park to hear the organ concert. That was a lot of fun. They literally have a giant organ in the park, and at 2 o’clock on Sundays they have a concert! We sat there for a bit, but really you could hear it from anywhere in the park. I wanted to draw because everyone was using umbrella’s to keep off the sun, and it looked really funny!

The organ. It was so cool!

A quick sketch of the organ concert.

We did go to the Japanese Tea Garden, The Model Railroad museum, and the Botanical Building, but really the park in and of itself would have been fun to just go hang out in.

The Botanical Building. The Buildings were so cool!

The next day we went to the zoo. My sister loves pandas, so our first stop was the panda exhibit. They were both asleep! I love red pandas though, and they were awake. They were also super fun to watch! We decided to come back to the pandas so that Elizabeth could see them awake.

It’s a nice zoo, but a little confusing to navigate. We were trying to see the tiger, and all we could find were monkeys! However, we did eventually find the tiger, and it was asleep. It was really hot that day, so a lot of the animals were either asleep, or not in their enclosures. I did get to see a lot of koalas though! They were all asleep too, but at least they were in trees so we got to see them. When we went back to see the pandas, they were awake and moving around so that was good. My favorite was still seeing the red pandas actually awake, and seeing koalas for the first time.

It was a beautiful zoo, but again, I do still like the zoo in Washington D.C. ! (I guess you just can’t get the east coast out of me).

Some gorgeous shots by Elizabeth: (All the photos in this post were taken by my sister Elizabeth, unless they are drawings or she is in them. I will be using many of these for reference for drawings, and they are beautiful, so I figured I would share them so you could all enjoy them too!):