A Few Days in San Diego, November 2002

The view from my hotel room window constantly reassured me that, if I suddenly needed fish tacos, anytime of day or night, I'd have no worries.

All the more reason not to hang around in the room, especially when San Diego has so many nice places to go.

If you're near the downtown, you're never far from public access to the waterfront.

Between the airport and the downtown is a maritime museum surrounded by jogging trails, restaurants and clubs.

You've got your renovated old Spanish buildings, and you've got your spruced up Gaslamp District...
 

Surprisingly, San Diego even has a Little Italy, home of a great British Pub and a ridiculous dot-com-boom-era theme restaurant (the first place I've ever laughed out loud at an entree as the server set it on the table).

You could easily spend all day going through Balboa Park, with its gardens and museums.
Well, I did, anyway.
Although it was November, many plants were just getting going.

Since they built the trolley, you don't need a car to get to Old Town anymore.

The thing is, Old Town San Diego is one of those places that, once you get there, you wonder why you came and what you're going to do to keep yourself busy. Like Plymoth Plantation, it seems like it only exists for school field trips and tourist shutterbugs.

I kept busy by shooting pictures inside a church, even though there wasn't a wedding going on at the time.

Inside the church, it smelled like churches did when I was a little kid. The decoration seemed just as morbid, too. But I noticed that they've replaced the votive candles with little electric lamps about the size of christmas tree bulbs. When you put a dollar in the box, you get to push a button, and your "candle" flickers warmly until the timer runs down.