Friday in the park

Friday

The fog rolled back out to sea as quickly as it had rolled in, leaving behind a sky as clear and blue as the finish on a clean Jaguar.

(I just wanted to work the car in somehow; I miss it.)

Well, the sky really was that blue. Bluer, even.

We spent the morning negotiating our plans for the week: where we wanted to go, when we wanted to go there, who was going to cook when. Who'd've known it could take four reasonable people with no hidden agendas so long to decide? It's just because there are so many things we want to do. Most of them overlap, and those are the things we'll end up doing.

At a certain point I decided that I'd said all I needed to say, so I went and showered and then drove down the street to the grocery store, and did our shopping while the others hashed out the details. On returning to the apartment, I did a little online research and found that getting to Black's Beach was not worth the effort. Black's is a beach that, according to what I'd read, has three attributes that interested me greatly: (1) it is a "semi-official" nude beach; (2) it has spectacular cliffs that drop dramatically down to the narrow strand, providing some of the most majestic scenery in southern California; and (3) there is a gliderport at the top of the cliffs, and from the beach you can watch people hang-gliding off the cliffs.

I'll leave it to you to determine which two of those three really interest me.

Having ruled out Black's, I also called about the free performances of "Hamlet" that are put on every year out in Coronado. We have decided to make Sunday our Peninsular Day, doing all the stuff we want to do out on the so-called Island. We now have reservations for the performance that day, which unfortunately is a matinee. It would have been much more convenient if it came toward the end of the day, in an evening performance.

After lunch -- yes, it took that long to work out the schedule for the week -- we headed over to Balboa Park to buy our seven-day passes. There are so many things we want to see and do in that park that, even though we won't be going there every day, it works out cheaper to get that. Having our tickets burning in our hot little hands, we immediately went on a trawl through the Model Railroad Museum, which closes early and, we figured, wouldn't take all that much time.

Could've easily spent another hour in there. The layouts in various guages are incredible; some take up two large rooms. They're all works-in-progress, being put together in fantastic detail -- as in the model of a bum by a campfire under a trestle -- by members of the local model railroading clubs, which have about 300 members. They strive to accurately represent actual rail lines in southern California at various points in history. 

It was too late by the time we finished for another museum, so after a few minutes relaxing in the plaza outside, we headed for coffee at the Urban Grind, a coffee shop on Park Boulevard that the owner of Timo's, my hangout back home, recommended. It turns out that his friends, Richard and Charlotte, no longer own the place, but it was still very good. (Another café, which used to be next door and was also owned by a friend of Tim's, is no longer there.)

It was too late to get to Cabrillo National Monument before it closed, so we decided to spend the evening exploring the Gaslamp District. After finding a parking place in a garage at the farther end of the area, we walked all the way up to Broadway, browsing the shop windows and stopping only in the Beverley Hills Motor Car Company showroom, where they had a car exactly like mine for sale (the only difference being that it was a 2003 model, while mine's a 2002, and its interior had been renovated, and its wheels weren't chromed), along with a Rolls, a 1954 Jaguar XK-120, and a couple of dozen other nice cars, mostly classics; a couple of reproductions and a poorly-restored '57 Chevy kept the collection from being truly extraordinary.

The area is full of interesting and cheap restaurants: Indian, Afghan, Thai, Irish, Italian, American, Persian, Greek, Turkish, Lebanese, Spanish. We passed by all of those, and settled instead into a sidewalk table at a more upscale Italian place called (I think) Panevino, where I was gratified to find that the waiters were actually Italian, not transplants from Brooklyn. I passed our waiter on the way to wash my hands, and in a glance he took in the text of my T-shirt (il mio amico imaginario ha bisogno di una bevanda) and was joking about it when I got back to the table. Paesan! The food was outstanding -- Jeff and I had shrimp stuffed with shrimp, Sherry had eggplant ravioli, and Nancy had ... I don't remember what. We each had a glass of good Italian wine that was significantly cheaper than the same American varieties. Afterwards we strolled the streets a while longer, then headed home. A good day.

Big Brother Shops at Ralph's

Grocery shoppers in San Diego are getting ripped off.

I've just come from doing our krogering for the week at a Ralph's Market near this condo, and am of course aghast at the prices charged here. Everyplace I've ever been, prices on groceries seem at least a little higher than we pay in San Antonio (with certain local exceptions, of course); but the prices here are royally exorbitant.

I won't go into details, as that would be tedious, and even my best friends don't want to know exactly how much more a can of coffee is here than there. But what really gripes me is the "card savings prices." If you get a Ralph's Rewards card (and I did: it was free, and let them collect all the data on my shopping habits that they want) you get big big savings on many many items.

Now, I don't believe for a minute that Ralph's is taking a loss on those prices; even with the Rewards card, the prices are higher than we pay at home. So what that tells me is how valuable the store considers the detailed spending patterns it can glean from their computer banks. It also tells me that Ralph's is really soaking anybody who doesn't have a Rewards card, figuring that they don't shop there regularly anyway, and so won't provide a reliable source of sales.

So I'm leaving the little key-fob card on the condo key rings, in the hopes that future tenants of this place will earn me big big rewards with their purchases of coffee and breakfast cereal.

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.