On Monday, after the conference had finished, I bought a ticket for one of those hop-on, hop-off bus tours (on the 'San Diego Trolleys', which are modeled on the old trams), and headed off across the bay to Coronado Island, which lies in front of San Diego, in hopes of getting a good view of the Pacific... which I did. Of course, I had to put my hand in the Pacific Ocean, to test the water (it's a time-honoured tradition in my family)! :) It seemed less salty than the Atlantic, at least at that spot...
I was photographing shells and various unidentified items of birdlife (even the garden birds are all different over there, it being a different continent and what-not) on the beach, and watching a family (or rather, a father!) build a sand castle, when suddenly I looked up to find the beach was being invaded... by a seemingly never-ending stream of army men running as if they were the only ones there (I literally had to get out of the way...)!
On Coronado Island, facing the beach, sits the Hotel Del Coronado, which was built without a plan - apparently, they'd finish work in the evening and discuss what to build the following morning... The result looks almost more like a collection of inter-connected houses than one complete building, but I admit it has a certain charm...
Another interesting curiosity about Coronado is this poor lonesome tree on what's essentially a traffic island, which is... a National Park! It's no wonder the USA is the country with most Natural Parks in the world, if they're counting things like this... :s (There's also a square where you can play 'spot the differences' with the houses, as there's a law that says no 2 houses on the island can be the same, so some construction company/architect made 6 or seven variations on a - very similar - theme, but I couldn't get a proper photo of that from the moving 'trolley')
I left the island the same way I'd come, and this time kind of managed to get a picture of San Diego itself, while we were driving across the bridge.
Next stop on the bus route was Balboa Park, a piece of land which was set aside to create a park by some visionary who saw how much the city of New York had had to spend to buy back the land to build Central Park (the trolley driver/guide really delighted in telling us how San Diego had gotten a much larger park for much less money), and which now hosts 13 or 15 museums (depending on who you ask). These include the Botanical Pavilion (the photo shows the view from the pavilion's entrance) and the Natural History Museum. The latter was showing the Darwin exhibition I'd managed to miss first in London and then in Lisbon, so guess where I spent the next hour!
Then it was back into town to find some supper, and get to sleep... or at least watch some olympic ice-skating from the hotel-room bed! ;)
The following day, I went to the Zoo (which is also in Balboa Park)! This picture of the view from the Zoo's cable-car is only a teaser, to give you an idea of just how green San Diego Zoo is...
The rest of the Zoo adventures will have to go on (yet) another (belated) post! ;)
