San Diego Bay – Twosna Travels

*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

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.