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A Ship, A Flight, and Family in San Diego

April 10, 2024 twosnatravels5 Comments

*The city of San Diego as seen from Shelter Island Park*

We have a nephew Mike, who is a pilot for the Navy. He had to do some operations time on a ship, so he was deployed on the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson for several months on a jaunt around the Pacific. Toward the end of our San Diego stay we watched the ship come back into port with his wife, Emily.

To get a good view, we met her at Shelter Island and enjoyed some time at the park while we waited. The ship was still a long ways off before we arrived and appears only as a dot on the center horizon in the picture below.

As the ship came closer to view, we could see all the sailors lined up on deck. It was an exciting and moving sight.

Unfortunately, I had to shoot all the pictures into the sun.

Mike was not on top, but stood by the rails on the open lower part of the ship which is the hangar deck. We could just barely see him with the binoculars.

The large ship was assisted into port by two tug boats.

The Carl Vinson aircraft carrier was part of the Carl Vinson strike force. Many various ships had been out to sea as part of this group, and they were all coming back to port during the days that we were here. It was interesting to see what was in the harbor on any given day.

We did not see Mike on this day, but two days later we had lunch with him and Emily.

Mike had some plans for us. We were able to return to the Carl Vinson for a visit when he had 24-hour duty a few days later. We picked up some take out with Emily and had dinner with him in the Officer’s Mess. He then gave us a tour all over the ship. We saw his room on ship, his office and also the bridge. We walked on the flight deck and saw the immense hangar below. There were so many flights of steps, passageways, and turns. It would be very easy to get lost! It was reminiscent for me of touring the Midway, although that ship is thirty years older than the Carl Vinson.

The Navy doesn’t take kindly to people taking photographs on board their ships, so we only have this one of us together with Mike.

The ship looked very festive as we left, brightly lit for the evening.

Mike has over a thousand hours of flight time, but needs a few more for post-Navy employment plans. He belongs to a flight club at a small nearby airport where he can “check out” a plane when he wants to fly. So, one afternoon we went up in the air with him.

I was in the back seat of the little Cessna. Looking at my pictures now, I don’t always know exactly where we were when I took them. This one is somewhere north of San Diego, looking out to the Pacific.

We flew over Mission Bay…

to just safely north of the Mexican border. We flew over our RV and Mike’s apartment. This is looking over the border to Tijuana.

Besides flight hours, a pilot also needs to log time taking off and landing a plane. Mike found several nearby airports where he put the wheels on the runway briefly and then we were up again. I was happy when I learned we were done going up and down in that little plane.

All too soon, we were permanently back on the ground. Cal helped Mike push the plane back into its parking spot.

What a fun flight!

I have another nephew in San Diego, a cousin to Mike. Marcus is married to Bekki and both are Lutheran pastors at different churches. We alternated between the two churches on Sunday mornings while we were in town. Bekki’s church is right across the street from Sunset Cliffs on the Pacific side of northern Point Loma.

As it happened, we were in town for a very special event – baby Isaak’s 1st birthday. His big brother Elijah was very excited about the party too.

We never know who we’re going to find on our travels. Cal has an Army buddy, Ed, who served with him in Greece. He wasn’t able to make it to the reunion in Thessaloniki a couple years ago, but he was in town at the same time as we were. Ed was the person who introduced us to Liberty Station, as we tried to have lunch at Cocina 35. There was a two hour wait! It was President’s Day and everyone was out in the beautiful sunny weather.

We passed on that, but went instead to a restaurant called El Indio, an order-at-the-counter place for Mexican that has been there for 40 years. The food was delicious. It was the first time I’d met Ed. He and Cal enjoyed catching up.

As if any of this could possibly get any better, we also were able to see our daughter Katie. We had actually already left San Diego when she came into town for a business trip. We drove 75 miles south to Temecula, California just to meet her for dinner. She had a slightly shorter drive up from San Diego. It had only been a couple of months since we’d seen her at Christmas time, but it was still great to have a short visit.

Figuring that we were missing the Texas barbeque that we had enjoyed so much a year earlier, she picked out the Swing Inn, another restaurant that has been in place forever. She has a talent for picking out good places to eat, as the barbeque was delicious.

I was sad to leave San Diego, but the high cost of living – even in our RV lifestyle – precluded a stay of any longer than three weeks for us. So we said farewell to this city and the folks that had shown us such a good time. Perhaps another year the road will lead us back.

Next time – we visit Coachella Valley

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Exploring San Diego: Point Loma, Old Town, and Balboa Park

March 25, 2024 twosnatravels3 Comments

Buckle up your seat belts, because you’re in for a ride all around San Diego!

We explored the city over a period of three weeks. We went many places, walked many miles, and I took hundreds of pictures. Any one of these destinations could be placed into one blog by themselves. But I’m going to do my best to condense, because time has passed since we were in San Diego. I have many more fantastic places to tell you about.

In my last post, I mentioned a harbor tour that we had taken while here. On that tour, we passed the USS Midway Museum, an aircraft carrier that missed World War II by one week. It is the longest-serving aircraft carrier, only having been decommissioned in 1992. I highly recommend touring this ship if you ever visit San Diego; we did it on our one previous visit a few years ago. Here, you can also see the back of the statue depicting the famous picture of a sailor kissing a nurse in New York Times Square on V-J day.

Point Loma is a place we frequently found ourselves in, near, or viewing from a distance. You can see the eastern side of it in the picture at the top of this post. Like Coronado, it is a long peninsula. Unlike Coronado, it hangs down from San Diego from the north instead of pointing up from the south. No one calls it an island: there is no part of it that is low enough to be at sea level for miles. It is high and rocky.

At the very top of Point Loma, where it merges with the city, is Liberty Station. This place was formerly a Navy trainee center. It has closed and the buildings have all been recycled and repurposed. This has been done in a way that respects its history but provides a multitude of various uses. The former barracks have artist studios and venues. There are both exclusive and casual restaurants as well as a food hall, and mixed with these is a high school, church, a Trader Joe’s and other commercial stores, an improv theatre, open air space for festivals, and I’m sure a whole lot more that I’m not mentioning. It’s all in a beautiful setting. The painting decorating this breezeway stood out among the more austere buildings.

We met my nephew’s wife, Emily, here for lunch while he was on deployment with the Navy. We could each have our own idea of a good lunch in the food hall, and all of it was delicious. The food hall looks a bit like it could formerly have been a mess hall. She and I lost ourselves at Sea Hive Station, a large vintage and maker’s store. We decided that the building had maybe been a gym in its earlier life.

I’m sending my readers a postcard from Liberty Station:

Farther down the coast, we had a view of Point Loma from the water on our harbor tour, and enjoyed seeing many sea lions alongside the coast.

In our truck, we drove down to the tip of Point Loma to visit Cabrillo National Monument.

This statue commemorates Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, who was the first European to set foot in present-day California. He explored the coast in 1542 from what is now Mexico, on behalf of the Spanish Empire.

Besides the visitor’s center, there is also the Old Point Loma Lighthouse to visit.

This lighthouse served from from 1855 to 1891, when a new lighthouse was built. We were not able to climb the tower.

From both the lighthouse and the statue, sweeping views were to be seen. We could look back at Coronado Island and San Diego harbor.

From this area, we drove down closer to the water, and could look at the new lighthouse. It’s still in operation, so it belongs to the Coast Guard and can’t be visited.

There are tide pools here which I wanted to see. To investigate them, one needs to visit the ocean at low tide. The first time we were here, we hit it squarely at high tide. We went down again after our visit to Liberty Station, right at low tide, and the area was closed for a sewage leak! Oh no!! Instead, we took the coastal path and enjoyed a walk along the mighty cliffs.

The National Park Service calls the dramatic cliff rocks here a “seven-layer sediment cake”. There are of course more than seven layers, which were formed millions of years ago when they were 3,500 feet under the sea.

Moving on from Point Loma, we go now up to the city of San Diego. On two different days, we visited Old Town San Diego and Balboa Park. We followed advice given to us and used public transportation. For Old Town, we took an Uber to the ferry at Coronado, and rode it over to the harbor area. We had the ferry mostly to ourselves on an early weekday morning.

When we got off the ferry, a short walk took us to light rail which, in San Diego, is called “The Trolley”. It took us right to Old Town San Diego State Historic Park.

Old Town dates back to San Diego’s earliest days. It is the first European settlement in what is now California. Some of the buildings here are museums, and this part of it is the state park. Some of the buildings have been turned into shops or Mexican open-air craft markets. There are countless restaurants, and all of them that I saw are Mexican. Whatever your idea of a fun day is, you can have it here. Many of the old buildings line a pleasant park in the middle. And admission is free, including the museums.

One of our first stops was to the La Casa de Machado y Stewart Museum, where the table was set for dinner. There were lots of beans, which looked pretty good to me.

We also visited the first newspaper and printing office.

The other building to the left of the printing office is a rock and gem shop, which, I might mention, is also a great place to wander though.

Here is the inside of the printing office:

The building housing the printing office was actually constructed in Maine, and shipped around the Horn in 1851. The first edition of the San Diego Union newspaper came out in 1868.

We also saw the earliest courthouses, an 1860’s restaurant, and other historic structures. We made the mistake of visiting on a Monday, and many of the museum buildings are closed on that day. There was still plenty to see, though, and the shops were mostly open.

After our excellent Mexican lunch (which did include beans), and having visited the buildings that we could, we wandered over to the Whaley House. It is considered to be the most haunted house in America because of family deaths in the house. Not only that, before its construction it had been the site of public town executions…right under the arch in the parlor.

Hauntings aside, it was a fascinating look at early San Diego and the Whaley family. Thomas Whaley was an extremely enterprising man and built the house big enough so that he could rent out parts of it at various times for a courtroom, a general store, and a theatre.

We visited Balboa Park just a few days later. We were getting better with public transportation at this point and caught a bus not far from our park. It took us over the Coronado Bridge and into downtown San Diego. We only had to transfer to another bus and ride two stops to get there.

Balboa became a park way back in the 1800’s, but then it hosted two world’s fairs – in 1915 and in 1935. Its layout and many of its buildings are the direct result of those fairs. There are eighteen museums to suit anyone’s interest – from Comic-Con to art, cars, railroads, air and space, and the Museum of Us, to name just a few. There are many various gardens, attractions, plus the usual things that you’d expect in a park: a golf course, a pool, baseball and soccer fields and the like. The world-renowned San Diego Zoo is here. The whole thing covers 1,200 acres, bigger than New York’s Central Park and Chicago’s Millennium Park combined.

We thought for this visit we would mainly wander and explore. Right away, I liked the feel of being in Europe as we entered the park.

Plaza de Panama was built for the 1915 Panama California fair, which celebrated the completion of the Panama Canal.

At lunch-time, I tried my first-ever Vietnamese banh mi sandwich at one of the park’s cafes near this plaza, and it was delicious.

Continuing on, this fig tree was planted for the same World’s Fair, and we wandered around under its canopy.

It’s a Moreton Bay strangler fig with a trunk that is 16 feet around. Although it still stands, its surroundings have completely changed in the over one hundred years since its planting.

We walked through a desert garden, and the Japanese garden which we had to pay to get into. Most gardens are free, but that one was not.

The Japanese garden had an impressive display of bonsai trees. This one is a 45-year-old “juniper forest”.

Like the gardens, some museums are free and some not. We went into two of the free museums, one being the San Diego History Center. They had a collage of the murals in that are in Chicano Park, exciting to see since we had ridden through it on the bus.

We spent the better part of a day in Balboa Park and only scratched the surface. I wanted to come back to concentrate on a museum or two or perhaps visit some sections that we missed. That was not to be, but just maybe we will be back another time.

San Diego provided us with a wealth of things to do, and after being here I still feel like I’ve only just begun to explore.

Next time – family fun during our San Diego stay

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A Stay on Coronado Island, California

March 17, 2024 twosnatravels4 Comments

After going as far south as we could go in Yuma, Arizona, we then traveled as far west as we could go. It is 150 miles from there to this place, where we bumped into the San Diego Bay.

We stayed in a Navy-run RV park, Fiddler’s Cove, on the Silver Strand of Coronado Island. It is a lovely place, one of the best of the military family camps, and we greatly enjoyed the three-week stay.

Coronado Island runs north and south. The northern tip of it is a Navy base. Directly south of that is the beautiful resort town of Coronado. The Silver Strand is a narrow stretch of land which leads south from Coronado, with the San Diego Bay on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other. The town was so close to us that we could ride bikes there on trails that led directly from our park and looped around the city.

Hotel del Coronado, or “Hotel Del” as it’s called in local lingo, was built in 1888. It had electricity when it was built, a novelty at the time, and supplied power to the little city around it. Presidents and celebrities have stayed here. Frank Baum wrote three books in his Wizard of Oz series while in residency at the hotel. Marilyn Monroe filmed “Some Like it Hot” here in 1958.

We took a stroll through the lobby, and then wandered around to the beach out back. From here, the hotel’s lighthouse-style cupola stands out like a beacon.

We took a harbor tour of the San Diego Bay, so some of my pictures will be from that boat ride. This picture of the bridge from Coronado Island to San Diego was taken on the boat.

I always received a beautiful birds-eye view of San Diego while riding in our truck on the bridge.

Do you see the yellow ship in back of this picture? It’s a banana boat!

On our harbor cruise, our captain told us that the Dole ships supply bananas to Western-$state grocery stores weekly from Central and South America. That’s 2 billion bananas annually for San Diego alone!

Another day, a Naval hospital ship was being assisted into port by a couple of tug boats.

On the harbor tour we caught the destroyer USS Stockdale coming in to dock, and waved to the sailors on deck.

Our time here wasn’t all about ships. Back at the park, we enjoyed views of the mountains across the bay and would check to see if there was snow on top.

We were on the very edge of our park, and could see a tall pole with an osprey nest on top from out our window. A pair of them resided in the nest and we delighted in watching them fly about or cuddle in their nest. I’m not a wildlife photographer, but I did get a hyper zoom on them one day.

To me, a great RV park has ample space for long walks. I could go right out our door to walk either along the beach on the bay or on the path directly behind it. You can see it in the picture on top of this post. If I had time for a longer walk, the path would lead to Silver Strand State Park where there were always birds hanging about.

The path had a tunnel under the road and then I could be right on the Pacific side of the state park, where people would be fishing, surfing, or just enjoying the beach.

We also walked over across the road one night to watch the sun go down over the Pacific.

The funny thing is, Coronado Island is not really an island. It’s a peninsula. The town of Imperial Beach sits at the southern end. Our bike path went that direction, too, and led into a nature preserve at the south end of the bay.

Imperial Beach enjoys the distinction of being most southwesterly point in the United States, as the restaurant at the end of its pier proudly points out.

The next city south of Imperial Beach is Tijuana, Mexico. At night, we could see the lights of the city on the hills in the distance. On a cool overcast day, we could just spot it from the pier. We also enjoyed watching a few surfers who are probably out in any kind of weather. I caught this guy right at the beginning of the crest of his wave.