Day 2 -- San Diego to Los Angeles

I didn’t sleep well last night. It was 11 p.m. in San Diego when I went to bed, but my internal alarm is still set for 6 a.m. Eastern Time, and it woke me up right on schedule. So, I spent three hours chasing after my racing mind and trying to wrestle it into submission.

We’ve taken enough of these trips that I can anticipate the mental and emotional hoops I jump through as I transition into Travel Mode. Right now, right on schedule, I’m at the Panic Stage, a.k.a. the “Oh Shit We’ve Never Going To See All the Wonderful Things That I Planned And My Carefully Researched Itinerary Is Already Going To Pot” phase. For hours this morning I fretted that this whole trip is just going to be a blur as we rush from one spot to the next, and I worried about missing out on all the things we don’t have time to see. Then, I worried about missing out on all the things we DO have time to see, because I’m too upset about the things we’re missing.
 
We are in San Diego for 24 hours. We don’t have time to see it all. But the point of this trip is not to see and do everything in San Diego; it is to get a wide-angle view of the California coastline. This trip offers a just peek at San Diego, but also a broader perspective on the entire region. And hopefully each stop will leave us wanting more. At least, that is what I tried to tell myself at 4 this morning.

 

Later, after we were all finally awake and dressed, we ate breakfast on the hotel pool deck, then packed up the van and headed out to Balboa Park, just about a mile straight south. The 1,200-acre greenspace (larger than NYC’s Central Park) is home to the famous San Diego Zoo, as well as dozens of museums and attractions, plus gardens, playgrounds, sports facilities and walking paths.

 

We could have spent the entire day there, but we had, like, an hour. So we wound our way through the park and somehow found the epicenter, called El Prado, a beautiful pedestrian mall studded with fountains and flanked by several major museums constructed in the ornate Spanish Colonial Revival style. 

The San Diego Museum of Art

The Botanical Building

The Museum of Us, a museum of anthropology

 

A stunning rose garden anchors the east end of El Prado.

 

Still in Panic Mode, I tried to set a brisk pace and hustle the group along (“No lingering! There’s so much more to see today!”) while also telling myself to slow down and enjoy what was in front of me. 

 

Before we left the park, we made sure to check out the Starlight Bowl, a circa 1936 amphitheater that sits at the southern end of the park’s museum campus. Today, it is deserted, wrapped in an ugly chain-link fence. It has been unused for several years, although apparently there is a campaign restore the venue. But back in its heyday, the Ford Bowl (as it was called in the 1950s) was the site of my parents’ first date. For those of you who might not know this: Mom and Dad celebrated their 60^th wedding anniversary last month. So, the visit to the Starlight Bowl today seemed especially sentimental.

From there, it was just a few minutes’ drive south to 2045 G Street: The house where my mom grew up. It looks neat, and the yard and garden are lush. I think I remember Mom complaining that the neighborhood had fallen into disrepair in the years after she moved away. If that was ever the case, it seems to have recovered. A quick tour of the blocks on the downtown fringe showed off homes that are well taken care of: fresh paint with candy-colored trim. Nice cars. Flowering shrubs. 

My dad and my brother, Steve, painting the house in 1971.

As I was taking a few pictures of the house from the sidewalk, a man walked out of the gate toward his car. Half sheepishly, half enthusiastically, I announced to him, “This is the house where my mom grew up! She left in 1957.” He seemed a little stunned, but he nodded and said, “Okay,” then got into his Porsche. 

 

Our next stop was the downtown waterfront, where we visited the USS Midway, a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier from 1945 to 1992 and now an immense and thoroughly engrossing museum. We got lost below deck, wandering through the corridors and discovering the mess hall, the engine room, the brig, the medical bays, the post office and the laundry rooms. On the hangar deck, Charlie and Natalie, and Keith and Clare did loop-de-loops and barrel rolls on airplane simulator rides. And on the flight deck, we got up close to jet fighters, helicopters and other specialized aircraft. 

One of the MANY corridors to get lost in

The Engine Room

Just a block away along the waterfront is Carnitas Snack Shack where we filled up on delicious pork tacos before hitting the road for points north. 

 

We had hoped that we could take the historic coastal highway from La Jolla through Oceanside and Huntington Beach, all the way to Los Angeles. But the coastal highway is choked with beach traffic and small-town stop-and-go. That route would have taken at least five hours. So, we eventually hopped on the 405 North (also choked with traffic, but at least it was moving) and were able to roll into LA about two hours later.

 

We’re staying tonight at the Kinney, a smallish hotel on the border of Venice and Marina del Rey, about a mile from the beach. The website had really sold me on this hotel; it looked hip and happening, with colorful murals and poolside ping-pong tables, and I thought it would be in the heart of all the hot action.

 

In reality, like any other place in Venice and Santa Monica, the hotel blends right into a busy business strip – next to an autobody shop, a dry cleaner and a liquor store – and backs up to a residential neighborhood; it’s a place you’d pass a million times before ever noticing it. Our rooms are brightly decorated, but otherwise fairly basic and a little worn, as if the hotel had been a Super 8 in a previous life, before new paint and wallpaper lifted it out of its doldrums. I’m not complaining. The space is quiet, the beds are supremely comfortable, and we have everything we need. We were entertained by the view from our window of a shirtless man exercising on his roof.  Maybe the slope adds a degree of difficulty to planks and pushups. Or maybe he enjoys the audience. Only in Los Angeles!

We stopped at the hotel long enough to check in and dump our bags, then we headed straight out to Venice Beach, parked the car, and walked half a mile down the boardwalk to the skate park, past shabby souvenir stalls, psychic parlors, tattoo emporia, hookah lounges, street carts and homeless camps, then turned around and walked two miles in the other direction to the Santa Monica Pier. 

 

Though the pier was absolutely packed with people, carts and vendors, Covid-19 restrictions mean that ride tickets are only available online: a contradictory head-scratcher for our times. The kids wanted to ride the Ferris wheel and the roller coaster, so we bought tickets using my phone, then realized that the rides had closed five minutes earlier. And because the tickets are on my phone, we couldn’t hand them to someone else who can use them another day. Sigh.

View from the pier!

By that time, we were all hungry, and Keith and I knew that we’d be able to find a great place to eat on the Third Street Promenade, a three-block pedestrian mall in the heart of Santa Monica. When Keith and I lived here, it was our go-to Friday night hang-out: We’d stroll the promenade to window-shop and people-watch. We’d breathe in the scent of olive oil and garlic wafting from the chi-chi bistros, listen to exciting new CDs at the Hear Music record store, take in a street performance and invariably end up at Barnes and Noble. 

 

To my deep disappointment, the Third Street Promenade is a shadow of its former self. There are only a couple of sad chain stores, like Victoria’s Secret, and, basically, a Sbarro’s Pizza. Even the heavenly scent is gone, and now the place just smells dirty.

Our sad mall-pizza dinner.

I guess times change. And, to be fair, it’s been 26 years since Keith and I lived here. Expecting the Third Street Promenade to be exactly the same would be like someone arriving when we lived there, in 1995, and expecting it to look like it did in 1969.

 

Still, I haven’t changed at all in the last 26 years, right? Two and a half decades is just a blink to me anymore. So, I guess I was surprised to see that time really does march on.

 

So I’m re-reading this blog post, now, and I’m kind of stunned at all the amazing things we got to do today. It was a full day; we were able to cover a lot of ground. And I’m now sliding into Phase Two of Travel Mode: Relax and enjoy the day, and sleep hard all night.