February 3, 2005 - San Diego Waterfront and Zoo

Chris showed up when we made our morning sprint to the big bathrooms, and it was great to see him again. He brought some maps and offered to be navigator for the drive into San Diego, and we gratefully accepted his offer As we were parked about 107 miles from the center of the city, the drive in took an hour and a half or so. Despite the length of our commute, I was glad we had stopped where we did because the last part of the route over the mountains involved a lot of steep slopes and twisting road. Pulling the trailer over that section would have involved several passes over 4,000 feet, and definitely strained the truck and my nerves. Without traffic and not pulling our trailer, the drive was fairly fast and Chris guided us to the waterfront area downtown without a hitch.

My first order of business was to take pictures of the truck at the edge of San Diego harbor. I figured that counted for the southwest corner of the U.S., so the truck had now been to three of the four corners of the continental U.S. During Wanderung 1 to Florida we had reached the southeast corner at Key West, Florida, and last summer during Wanderung 6 we had reached the northwest corner of the "Lower 48" at Cape Flattery, Washington. I was reassured about my Quixotic Quest to get the truck to all 4 corners of the U.S. by Chris's account of motorcycle riders who do exactly the same thing.

San Diego boasts a maritime museum housed in 4 or 5 ships moored on the waterfront, and after buying our tickets we toured the first one, an old ferry. The ferry had been found to be too unstable for actual use and shortly thereafter converted to use as a kind of waterfront amusement center, I gathered. The interior was built with beautiful wood paneling, which you might expect for turn-of-the-century shipbuilding, and a complete set of 20+ stained glass windows all around the upper deck seating area, which I did not expect. Those windows gave the room a very mellow type of light that definitely added to its charm.

The main floor of the ferry was devoted to maritime exhibits including many ship models and the history of coastal fisheries. Some exhibits had full-sized artifacts such as a pretty old wooden runabout, and at the rear of the ship we found the top of a huge old triple expansion steam engine that would have powered the vessel. I climbed down below decks to check into the heart of the beast and found the set of crankshafts and huge boilers that would have supplied the steam.

Chris and I also hopped over the side onto a beautiful old steam launch in picture perfect condition. I would have paid a pretty penny to take a ride around the harbor in that, but none were offered. Chris and I certainly enjoyed taking pictures of the cabin and salon areas as the varnished wood finish was a pretty backdrop to the antique furnishings of the launch. I should mention that pilot boat rides are offered on weekends during the winter, but we, as luck would have it, were there during the week and could not try that.

From the ferry we walked down the wharf to the "Star of India", a steel-hulled sailing ship built in 1873. She was used to transport people and goods from England to India, Australia, and New Zealand, and what an adventure that must have been!

The accommodations ranged, of course, from the tidy little passenger cabins in the officer's quarters aft to the lower decks. The upper cabins had been furnished just as they would have looked back in the 1870s, complete with chamber pots, clothes, and children's toys, but the lower deck areas had been converted to different sorts of exhibits, including maritime art, knots, and ships in bottles. The latter included one example of a ship in a light bulb that was glowing neon orange! The best Chris and I could figure was that someone had built the small metal ship and then inserted it into a light bulb and somehow made it an active glowing filament. I'm not sure how that was finally done, but it certainly was an interesting tour de force.

Our final ship in the maritime museum was the erstwhile H.M.S. Rose, recently re-christened H.M.S. Surprise and used in the recent film "Master and Commander". I had seen that film as well as read every book in that series written by Patrick O'Brien, so I was intensely interested in seeing the details of the interior and how they had done the filming. When we last saw H.M.S. Rose in Baltimore Harbor about 20 years ago or so, she had looked rather forlorn, unfinished and neglected, and it absolutely warmed my heart to see her spiffed up and being maintained. In fact, the day we were visiting the museum staff was replacing rotted wood sections with new ones, an ongoing fact of life for a wooden sailing vessel.

I thought the museum had done a really excellent job of furnishing the Surprise with the period items used during the filming of the movie, and then explaining about how those items were used in naval life around 1800. The table set in the Captain's quarters, for example, looked like it came straight out of Horatio Nelson's time, and they even had the cello played by Marturin and the violin played by Aubrey in the O'Brien books. One thing I learned that I did not know was that the rating system used for men of war at that time actually governed whether or not Captains had to engage other vessels in combat. If you were Captain of an equal or greater rated vessel, for example, you were expected to engage in combat and could jolly well face court martial if you didn't. But if you were Captain of a smaller rated vessel you could legitimately run away and fight another day with no disgrace.

Dragging myself out of the Surprise, we all headed off for lunch at the Midtown Deli, I think, an 1950s-style restaurant kind of on the way to the San Diego Zoo. We spent the rest of the afternoon at the zoo, with Monika gamely limping along from exhibit to exhibit.

The San Diego Zoo bills itself as world famous, and that is not, I think, any exaggeration. Justifiably so, I might add after having been there. The animal exhibits are all built on the natural habitat model pioneered by Hagenbeck, and include the requisite lions and tigers and bears (Oh My!) as well as rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, and elephants.

But they also exhibited the lesser-known animals such as tapirs, pygmy hippopotamuses, anteaters, and giant pandas.

I liked seeing some of these less traditional fauna, and some of them, at least, seemed interested in seeing us, or at least they came over to the ditch when I talked to them. I had never seen an anteater up close and personal before, for example, and it really has an impossibly long nose; clearly it is so specialized for ant eating that if anything happens to the ants it will be a gone gosling in the struggle for survival. I also had never seen a pygmy hippopotamus before; I just didn't know they came in a midget size. Kind of reminded me of the pot-bellied Asian pigs some folks had as pets a while back, only about 3 times larger. That is still a whole lot smaller than a full-sized hippo, of course, and I wondered if the pygmy version would make any kind of house pet, or whether they have the well known ill-temper of the full sized hippo.

As we traipsed back and forth and up and down thru the zoo grounds, we passed thru several bird aviaries. These were typically set up as two story high cages with stairs winding around inside. That way we could see the birds perched in the trees at the top as well as the "ground pounders" below. Birds were flitting hither and yon and chirping all the while, so that was fun.

We also attended a sea lion show at 3 p.m. and that was very well done. They managed to combine funny and educational patter into the show in a seamless way. Altho it looked effortless, it really took a quite a bit of talent and preparation, and I admired that.

It was, I might add, an extremely well trained sea lion. Monika was getting tired as we came up on closing time, so we made one last foray down to see the tigers and then, playing her sprained ankle for all it was worth, she convinced a guard to have a shuttle bus drive us back to the exit.

We drove back east to camp as night fell, and then had a nice meal with Chris. The nice part about driving with Chris is that he will converse on a wide variety of topics, and that sure helps you stay awake. We chatted about everything from politics to economics to electronics to motorcycles, and an awful lot in between that I just don't remember. We continued the conversation while having a simple dinner of sandwiches, and afterwards we downloaded pictures and showed Chris what we had taken that day (about 300 pictures). But we all started to fade before 9, so we turned in early for the night.