After I wrote here about Jim visiting last month, I had a flood of friends offering to come keep me company here on the boat. I guess I sounded lonely! First was Diana, then Cindy came, and now my dear friend Chriss from SLC has just stopped by. Next week my son Porter and his wife Erin are coming, and the week after that, Phillipe Shiela and Anya, who are all on a big California road trip, are stopping by, and then not long after that my daughter Kenzie and her husband Julio are coming. I love the company, it is wonderful, and not just a little bit crazy! giddy up

So Chriss is here now and she wanted to go see San Diego. My friend Harrison is still down there with his new boat and asked us if we would come down and sail with him as he gets acquainted with it, so it worked out well. We drove down there the other day and spent the whole day sailing out on San Diego Bay. WOW what a beautiful and interesting place to sail. We had good steady moderate winds and the water was calm as it is such a protected bay. We sailed out of his marina on Coronado Island (Which I think is really a peninsula, not an island, but maybe the chamber of commerce thought calling it an island sounded better to attract tourists…) and out under the Coronado bridge, soaring many hundreds of feet over our mast. No worries about hitting it!. (I noticed as I drove over it the other day that along the edge there are signs posted up there offering suicide prevention help and a toll free number to call if you find yourself standing up there thinking to end it all with a step off! I imagine if you were going up there to jump you may well have your phone with you. Even though it would get ruined in the water, you would hate to miss that last-minute call saying you won the lottery, she forgives you for being an idiot and loves you after all , and your dog came back…)

　

San Diego harbor is a huge natural harbor and is the home of a massive US navy fleet. We sailed past 4 huge aircraft carriers, destroyers, big grey ships of every kind. They towered hundreds of feet over us and were over 1000 feet long. (My friend Robert back in SLC said he would never get on a boat that wasn’t at least 500 feet long and grey. Now I know what he means! These things look like they could handle just about anything) We sailed past the big gleaming white hospital ship Mercy, which my friend Sheila has spent many months over the years working as a volunteer nurse providing medical care for people all over the world. I think she just got back from working on the Mercy for 6 weeks in Thailand and the south pacific. We also sailed past the San Diego city water front which I must admit is quiet pretty. The city skyline juts up right along the edge of the water and the buildings were very interesting shapes and colors. I bet it would look really cool at night.

We sailed past a yacht, Red Sky, at anchor there that has been anchored next to me for several days up in Dana. I never met them, but I bet they are getting ready to head on down to Mexico. Tis the season to be heading south. Someday I plan to do the same.

The next 2 days we played tourist, spending all one day on the ship Midway museum. We were given free tickets and thought “what the hey, we were not too interested but we’ll run on and take a quick look.” Ended up we spent 5 hours there and could have spent more! It was fascinating! The Midway is an aircraft carrier and was launched just as World War 2 was ending. It served in Korea, Vietnam and the first Iraq war, and was recently decommissioned and turned into this museum. This ship was home to 4500 sailors at a time, launching airplanes off the deck and the processes for keeping all that going were amazing. We had these little headphone devices that we listened to as we walked all over and up and down and around the ship and listened to the stories of the people who were on the ship all those years. The ship had huge fuel oil boilers that created steam that ran all the systems like the turbines for the propellers to drive the ship, the electrical generators, the plane launch catapults, and even the cooking was done by steam. And of course there was plenty of hot water for showers! We were told that the new nuclear ships run exactly the same way except the steam is now created by the nuclear device instead of a giant oil burner. All steam driven. I guess not much changes after all eh?

After the Midway we caught the TRAX up to Old Town, a re-creation of the original site of San Diego, with old Spanish style adobe haciendas. The high light of the place was the mariachi band that played us a really cool mariachi style medley of Pink’s Brick in the Wall and Santana’s Oyo Como Va and Black Magic Woman. WOW I was blown away by how cool it sounded in that style!

The next day we toured Balboa Park which is a huge city park built for a exposition in 1913 to celebrate the Panama canal. The park is big, many square miles, and along with many miles of hiking trails is home to the San Diego zoo, as well as a collection buildings for museums, galleries, botanical gardens, and concert halls. We explored the Museum of Man and the natural history museum. Both were pretty cool. The Museum of man was mostly for fossils and the development of early man, very interesting, and a mummy exhibit. I was intrigued by a sign stating that the exhibit did not contain any mummies from North American burial sites (As if only those were of any special significance deserving special respect. Hmmmm. Pretty arrogant of us. No wonder much of the rest of the world hates us!

The natural history museum was cool. It was not just a lot of dead animal in glass cases like some NH museums. This one had several exhibits about habitat including water and how critical the shortage is and how it all plays together for nature and humans to survive and thrive togehter, especially here in the desert. We saw a movie about life in the coral reefs down off the Baja coast, which was very interesting because that is where I am headed eventually!. There were many displays of fossils of ancient marine critters like the monosaur which is like a huge shark. There was a display of gemstones. I was not too gaga about all the sparkly stuff, but was fascinated by a picture of deep in a cave in Mexico where these guys in orange jumpsuits were crawling around on giant quartz crystals dozens of feet long, all tilted and leaning at odd angles and gleaming sparkling white. It almost looked fake it was so bizarre. And did you know that they have not discovered any element out in space that is not found here on earth? For some reason I thought that is an interesting factoid.

I came back to the boat for some R&R, Chriss is still touring San Diego and will catch the train up here later. We plan to go sailing again if conditions permit. I must admit it is nice to just hang out here quietly alone for a bit!