Travel

Tarmo Hannula

From the desert to the sea

By TARMO HANNULA

Previously in this travel tale, my wife Sarah and I left the desert over the mountain ridge and into San Diego along Highway 8 past El Cajon, La Mesa and into Pacific Beach. It was here, in 1969, that my family arrived after living on the 32-mile long island of Guam for two years.

We checked into our favorite spot, The Beach Cottages, built in 1948 along the shore and the mileslong Boardwalk, a wide concrete path heavily used by locals and tourists year round.

This was the beach town where the four kids in my family moved away from home, where my folks bought an older Spanish-style house on Emerald Street and where both of my parents died of old age. This is where I graduated from Mission Bay High School in 1972 and where I got my first job at LaJolla Car Wash. And it’s where I met my first girlfriend, Lori, and I bought my first electric bass guitar for $20 and played music with a bunch of different bands.

I got to know San Diego pretty well, the rocky shores of LaJolla, Balboa Park, the drug-infested Ocean Beach, Point Loma and Mission Beach.

Once my folks bought me a nice 3-speed bicycle, the doors of this place opened even wider in my sophomore year; I must have put 100,000 miles on that bike. Once I moved away from San Diego I continued to visit my folks there for decades and watched the changes come and go. Though the main drag of Pacific Beach, Garnet Avenue, has certainly been gentrified—Starbucks, Togos, McDonalds, etc.—there’s still a flavor of

DRAMATIC LANDMARK

The reflection pond at Balboa Park near downtown San Diego.

a small gritty beach town to it, in my view. On this trip we drove out Pacific Highway to downtown and saw the Gaslamp District, a hunk of downtown where city planners took great strides to preserve and boast some of the area’s older, interesting buildings. At the center of it all is Horton Plaza. When we came here in ‘69, this spot was a raunchy, run down hang out for druggies and a lot of drunk sailors trying to find relief from their duties in the Vietnam War, with San Diego being the largest military base in America, with its vast harbors. Horton Plaza back then boasted scores of XXX movie houses, ratty bars and littered streets. Now Horton Plaza is a splashy shopping mall and much of downtown has been spruced up.

We then drove a few blocks to Balboa Park and walked past the Old Globe Theater, the lovely reflection pond and marveled at the bounty of gorgeous buildings and landscape. Placed in reserve in 1835, the park's site is one of the oldest in the U.S. that was dedicated to public recreational use.

Balboa Park hosted the 191516 Panama-California Exposition and in 1935-36, the California-International Exposition, both of which left dramatic architectural landmarks. The Spanish Colonial Revival architecture here is breathtaking, on top of the numerous dazzling gardens, the Japanese Friendship Garden.

We took Highway 8 to Highway 5 north to LaJolla and parked at LaJolla Cove, one of my family’s favorite spots. The is the home of UC San Diego, the famed Scripps Institute and the ritzy Girard Avenue, the main drag of downtown, that boasts a mix of high-end boutiques, gift shops and the like as well as the popular Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

In the final leg of this story we head north to San Marcos, Paso Robles and home.