A Day at the Beach

Jean and Bud took me to sight see at the beach today. First we went to the LaJolla beach. The beach is below a bluff and at the top of the bluff is a linear park. The City has built small little screen houses with three benches around the 3 walls facing the ocean. Jean said that she used to make breakfast of muffins and fruit and bring guests and family members to those little houses to eat breakfast and watch the waves break over the beach. She has fond memories of that. We walked along the top of the bluff and I took some photos. At one spot there is a curved sea wall that creates a protected beach. Bud said this used to be called the Children's Pool and was available for children to swim in protected from the breaking waves. However, now it has been taken over by pupping seals and is closed. We got as close as we were allowed to the seals sunbathing on the beach.


Then we unintentionally took a tour of the beach neighborhood of LaJolla because the City was doing a lot of street work and many streets were blocked off. It is a lovely, upscale suburb with a lot of Rodeo Drive type shops, yoga studios, and high end art galleries.

Next we drove over to Old Town. When San Diego was first settled as a cow town, this area was the first part of the area settled. There is a replica of what the town looked like in the late 1800s at the Visitor Information Center. Old Town is laid out with a large rectangular village green surrounded by old historic buildings - some of which house museum-type displays of what used to be in that space, such as a sheriff's office and a schoolhouse, and some of which house shops like jewelers, clothiers, etc. We walked around the village green and stopped in a few buildings. In the tobacco shop, the owner has his own personal collection

of pipes on display. One of his pipes is 5 centuries old. Most of them are 17th and 18th Century. And he sells pipe tobacco, cigarette lighters, etc. The sheriff's office boasts a wax sheriff and a desk for the circuit riding judge who would hold court there. The schoolhouse is a one-room school. The Commercial Hotel is still a hotel, although it is undergoing renovation and so is not open for booking rooms right now. The photo is of me bellying up to the Commercial Hotel bar.

A couple of cowboys were on the village green presenting Shakespeare plays in a hilarious old-West way. We watched the tail end of Hamlet. And Hamlet was a ham.

We ate in the Spanish mission style building that adjoins this Old Town at a central courtyard restaurant called Casa de Reyes. The meal was excellent, but huge. And the smallest margarita on the menu was 12 ounces; largest was 58 ounces. I got the 12 ounce margarita and had to leave some of it sitting there.

We drove over to Coronado, but took a twirl thru downtown on the way. The Hotel del Coronado is amazing. It is absolutely huge. It sits on a peninsula, and must take up about 3 city blocks. This hotel played an important role in Marilyn Monroe's movie "Some Like it Hot," but has been featured briefly in many, many other movies over the years. The photo on the left is the back of the hotel and the photo on the right is the front.

There was a guy creating a sand castle on the beach right next to another even more elaborate sand castle. I asked him how long his sand castles last. He said that the more elaborate one was his also and it was a week old. He creates a new sand castle or some type of sand sculpture at least once a week. Often he gets paid to do special birthday or anniversary editions. Very cool. The sand on the La Coronado beach was straight out of central casting. It was so soft and fine, it was almost powdery. As you can see by the photo on the right, I have worn appropriate footwear for the beach. Cousin Jean is barely visible in the far right corner of the photo on the left.