San Diego, Day 1

We spent Thursday morning getting oriented. From our hotel, we drove through the neighbourhoods between Old Town and downtown; then across the impressive Coronado Bay Bridge to what's called North Island, although it isn't an island but the wide end of a long, narrow peninsula. The knob end of it is taken up by a naval base; south of that is the town of Coronado. Farther south the town's newer areas take the form of high-rise (and, let's be honest, architecturally unpleasant) condominiums in bulk. This part is called the "Silver Strand." Below that, the peninsula narrows to the point where it's basically a beach on the ocean side, the road, and a beach on the bay side.

Much of the beach is reserved for military use; Navy Seals were out early, training there, and the attendant at the state beach nestled in between the Navy beaches said he had heard the concussive sound of shells exploding around daybreak. All we saw was some bright pink smoke coming from an enclosure by the side of the road. The water here, according to him, is about 70 degrees in summer and 55 in winter. Brrr.

Near where the peninsula connects to the mainland, we came across a wildlife preserve at the Tijuana River Estuary. The Visitor's Center wasn't open that early, but we walked around the trails in the immediate area, spying a rich assortment of birds, lizards, insects and mammals (mostly rabbits). There was unusual plant life -- well, unusual to me, anyway -- and on the far side of the reserve was a line of condominiums; beyond that was a dark layer of sky that I took to be smog. But by the time we got back toward the visitor's center, the smog had become fog, and was rolling -- literally, rolling -- across the estuary.

We picked up Interstate 5 -- oh, pardon me: The 5 -- and took it back up to San Diego. We went into Balboa Park, not stopping at the many museums -- we'll spend some time exploring some in the coming week. The Museum of Man is in a building that looks like it used to be a church for wealthy parishioners. There's also an Air and Space Museum and an Automotive Museum, both of which interest me, and I think I saw a Museum of Natural History. And of course there's the famous San Diego Zoo. From there we drove down to the Gaslamp District to see what that was all about. It's kind of like Deep Ellum, but with taller buildings and a greater concentration of toney restaurants and boutiques.

We drove out to our condo, to see how far it is from the airport -- only about 15 minutes, and right on the shore -- but we couldn't check in until 3pm. So we headed back down to pick up Nancy and Jeff.

San Diego Airport is strung out in a line along the shore opposite Harbor Island. There's no cellphone waiting lot, but then there is a park along the shore just across the road from the terminals. It's called Spanish Landing Park, presumably because it's where the settlers landed when Spain decided to plug a settlement into California to keep it from the British and Russians in the 1790s (the nascent United States was no threat at that time, still recovering from the exertions of the Revolutionary War). Sherry thought the sign said "Spanish Language Park," so that's what it's become in our little group.

While we were waiting for them to arrive, I mentioned to Sherry that I'd read that San Diego is one of the ten richest cities in the country, according to Forbes Magazine (maybe it was Forbes; I don't really recall). Just as I said that, an old man went by pushing a bicycle piled high with old clothes, and I realized that, in just half a day in San Diego, and most of that in the car, I'd seen more homeless people and panhandlers than in the last year or two back home. I don't know why that would be, unless it's that San Antonio has either a better support system, keeping them off the streets (or at least dressing them up in white shirts and slacks and giving them those white buckets to collect "donations" in) or no support system at all, causing them all to move west to San Diego.

If I really cared either way, I'd probably look into it. But I don't: as long as they don't bother me, let them do as they wish.

Well, Jeff had a conference call to handle for work, so we picked up Nancy and left him in the airline's lounge. The three of us drove back to Old Town for a light lunch at the Livingroom Cafe, which has a wide patio out front. We were there for two hours or so, then we made a short foray to a few shops. The Mexican Restaurant where Sherry and I had eaten on Wednesday night had blown-glass lamps from a shop on Harney Street; some of them looked artful so I wanted to see the shop. A very small shop, maybe 20 feet wide and 40 feet deep; the back portion was given over to the glass ovens and work area; the front area was crammed full of glass. The vases and gewgaws were unimpressive, uninspired, derivative. But the hanging lamps were nicer than I think I've seen anywhere. All the same basic shapes, and the hardware is off the shelf, but the colours and patterns have an appeal about them that puts them well above the run of the mill stuff you'd see at, say, Wimberley Glass.

From there we drove out to the condo and checked in. There are three low towers in this development: two on the shore side and one larger one on the street side. We're in the one on the street side, but on the top floor and facing the ocean, which we can see between the other two buildings. There's no air conditioning so we're leaving all the windows open.

After downloading our luggage (I don't know how we're going to get everything into the car for the trip to Los Angeles and back next week; it barely fit without Jeff), we drove back to the airport and collected Jeff, then went looking for a coffee shop run by a couple of friends of Tim, who has Timo's Coffee Shop on San Pedro, my hangout back home. It's called the Urban Grind, on Park Boulevard. We found it, but they don't serve food after about 3pm, so we decided to head out to Cabrillo National Monument on Loma Point, hoping to catch the sunset with a view of the city. Sadly, Cabrillo N.M is in a naval base and closes at 5pm, so we couldn't get there (Jeff thinks that if we are at Cabrillo at closing time, we can stay on there, so we might see the sunset from there yet), but the guard at the gate told us how to get to Sunset Cliffs, about a mile north of there. We headed over that way, and as we came over the rise to see the road dropping steeply down to the shore, we saw a thick fog bank below, with the sun low in the sky just above it. The cliffs were shrouded in fog, so we went back up to the spot where we'd first seen the fog and watched the sunset from there. It was beautiful to see.

From there, we made a tour of the steak houses located by the GPS program in Nancy's palm pilot. The third one, Kelly's, was where we settled, and had a very nice meal: Food, 4 chili peppers; Ambience, 4 chili peppers; Service, 5 chili peppers; Value, 4 chili peppers. By then it was fairly late and we were all well drained by the day, so after a quick foray into the supermarket for breakfast fixins, we crashed. The fog was thick and we could see nothing of the water from our apartment, but could hear the waves breaking on the wide beach below. It's still foggy this morning, but it's thinned enough that I can see the waves and the early surfers and joggers passing by.

Phoenix to San Diego in only one day!

Wednesday, September 23:

Territorial prison, Yuma

The trip across the desert from Phoenix to San Diego is deceptively long, and there is very little of interest along the way: the old Territorial Prison in Yuma (which is closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays) and the Desert Tower in ... well, nowhere, really. We stopped at both.

The Territorial Prison is on the banks of the Colorado River, which these days, and at this time of the year, and this far downstream (below all the canals that siphon off water for Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and a host of other cities, plus much of the irrigation in Arizona and California) isn't much larger than the San Antonio River. It seems to consist of a pair of native-stone buildings set at right angles to one another, with windows only at the very top -- tiny windows, about a foot square, with iron bars set in them. That's about all I could tell, from the outside.

Desert Tower

The Interstate drops down all the way to sea level just west of the Colorado River and the Algodones (or Imperial) Dunes. I would have liked to get some pictures of the sand dunes; I was at their northern end about ten years ago, and they're pretty stunning. They look like Tatooine, the desert moon where R2D2 and C3PO landed after escaping from Darth Vader. Unfortunately, there is no place to stop on the southern end. The rest area smack-dab in the middle of the dunes is literally two cement-block latrines set in a paved area between the eastbound and westbound lanes of the freeway.

From there, the road starts to climb, gradually at first, then steeply through a series of long winding S-curves up to about 4,000 feet at the Desert Tower. The Desert Tower is a sort of folk-art construct overlooking the Interstate and the Imperial Valley. It was built in the 1920s, when the road through these parts from Yuma to San Diego was a two-lane highway. Most cars couldn't make it through without stopping to add water to the radiators, and even now there are concrete vats along the Interstate containing water for radiators every few hundred yards.

From the Tower you can see all the way across the valley, past what's left of the Salton Sea. It's a stunning spread of apparent nothingness: rock, sand, more rock, sun and rock. Oh, and that little bit of water way out there. Back in the 20s and 30s, a local man started carving fanciful animal shapes out of the rock, and these lie in the boulder field across the driveway from the Tower. You can clamber around in the rocks, kind of like I talked about doing at Texas Canyon (see my post a from few days ago).

Interstate 8 runs very close to the Mexico border most of the way. We passed through several immigration checkpoints; at one of them there was a sign boasting of the effectiveness of such checkpoints. It seemed to indicate -- it wasn't specific enough to say for certain -- that all of the internal checkpoints along the border from San Diego to Brownsville had resulted in so many immigration arrests, so many criminal arrests, so many tons of drugs confiscated, so many DUIs referred to local LEOs; if the statistics were for that one checkpoint, I would say (a) the checkpoint was moderately successful and (b) the illegal immigrants in that area have to be unreasonably stupid. If, as I suspect, the statistics were for the entire Mexican border, then I'd say that these checkpoints are a waste of time and resources, an easily avoidable inconvenience, and an irritating, albeit minor, infringement of my constitutional freedom of travel. (Yes, Virginia, the Supreme Court does say it's in there.)

Oh, well. So we get into San Diego around rush hour, and manage to get to our hotel without running out of gas (which, by the way, jumped about seventy-five cents per gallon in price on crossing into California -- an indication of just how out of balance the government of this state is. Think about it.) We had dinner in Old Town, the "original" settlement area of the city. If you're familiar with San Antonio, it's like La Villita but with four-lane streets and a lot more people, shops and restaurants. There was nothing the least bit authentic about it. We ate at one of the three restaurants recommended by the concierge at our hotel. The food was good, the chips were okay, the salsa was really good, and the margaritas were superb. Even the mariachi band was well within my tolerance limits for such things.

There will always be a Phoenix.

In the famous words of the late Governor Ann Richards, you can put lipstick on a pig and call it Monique, but it's still just a pig. That's kind of how I feel about Phoenix. You can bring in all the palm trees and esperanzas you want, fill the streets with Beemers and Volvos, and paint all the houses in earth tones, but it's still just a big, dusty flat spot in the desert.

It's not much of a tourist town, by any stretch. The attractions here are more geared to those who are here year-round, or at least through the winter months. People who live here, at least all the ones that I've met, enjoy it. The dry heat really is a lot more comfortable to those who venture outside than the relatively moist air of San Antonio; yesterday it was 104 and I thought it was very comfortable ... lying in the pool. But still.

And getting around is pretty easy, except where the traffic gets really bad. All of the through streets are wide and straight, and the entire Valley of the Sun is a grid of evenly spaced thoroughfares bracketing architecturally cohesive subdivisions, each with its monumental entrance, its water feature, its theme of colours and edificial gewgaws (Cupolas! Niche windows! Pilasters!). And where the population has reached a certain critical mass of density and prosperity, the appearance is one of comfort and order: a sort of regimented riverless Rhineland.

And of course, it's a very, very large city, with a large middle class, so it's full of good restaurants, and probably has a first-rate nightlife, for those who want that sort of thing. There are jobs here, and a sense of opportunity and promise. It may even be a very good place to raise your kids, though I'm not sure what the criteria for that is; honest small-business owners and con artists seem to come from all backgrounds equally.

But driving around the city yesterday, on the way to the vistas of Dobbins Point and South Mountain Park, I felt a certain je ne sais quoi, a feeling that the pleasant and promising aspects of Phoenix are unreal, that this massive sprawl of urbanity and civilization is more than just artificial; that it is an interloper in this desert, that it will eventually move on to places more suited to human habitation (please, God, not South Texas!) and leave behind the crumbling hulk of Spanish tile and concrete, like so many cicadas.

But that's not really going to happen, is it? No, as long as there is electricity to power the air conditioning, and gasoline to power the pick-up, and as long as there is snow in the Rockies to fill the canals here, Phoenix will survive, and prosper. So I'm thinking I should buy some land here, maybe a dusty half-acre on the Scottsdale side....