We didn’t have to be at the airport until 12:30, so I had goals for the morning:

• coffee and a croissant or perhaps a donut
• selfie in front of the Longhairs‘ place of business
• buy a couple of bottles
  • Sunday botanical gin
  • Provisional barrel-aged gin
  • Perfetto digestiv (no link; I’m beginning to believe the maître d’ at Bencotto, who told us it was the owner’s grandmother’s recipe)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that one simply does not set out for any destination with the Lovely First Wife without double-checking 1) the address; and 2) the directions. I foolishly failed to do so as we set out for the Donut Bar, “only seven blocks away.” (That sounds like a hike, but San Diego’s blocks are only 1/4 the size of New York’s by design.)

Therefore, when we had gone the required distance and not only was there no Donut Bar but no shops of any kind, I double-checked on my phone. The Donut Bar was nowhere close. We had gone the distance on J Street; the Donut Bar was up Sixth Ave. We ended up back at Achilles Coffee, which has only food food, not croissants or donuts.

I double-checked the Longhairs’ address, and it occurred to me to look at the street view — there was no indication that the Longhairs were in that building. They just moved there this past fall so perhaps the street view was not up to date, but we decided not to make the trek just to take a photo in front a nondescript industrial building. Sorry, my dudes, I’ll catch up with you next year.

Back on my phone, I found that Skinflint’s Wine & Spirits Shop was right there on Fifth Avenue, across from our hotel, and it was already open at 10:00 a.m. Awesome!

Except that it wasn’t. The map led us to a door on J Street, with no indication there was anything there but office-type businesses. Around the corner was the Wine Bank, but it didn’t open until noon, plus it advertised itself as a tequila shop. Even now, Google Maps will tell you it’s at 363 Fifth Avenue, but it appears to be in the middle of the building. The photo is of the Wine Bank, which was actually padlocked. Is Skinflint’s inside the Wine Bank, like a speakeasy? It occurs to me that this might be the case, but if so, why it claim to be open at 10:00 a.m. when the front door is padlocked until noon?

Not a problem. Perhaps the shops at the airport would have what I wanted? Nope. The bottles there were nothing but big name bottles that you can buy anywhere. Come on, San Diego (and every major airport, for that matter), stock your local distilleries! Represent!

Thus defeated, we flew home, the end.

—————

Pro tips

First of all, Pack Up & Go is a good thing. The excitement of not knowing where you’re going — only that it’s not somewhere you’ve been recently — is fun, and the events they scheduled for us were solid (although we blew off two of them). If you’re an experienced/savvy traveler, filling in the gaps once you find out where you’re going is not a problem. If you’re not, then head straight to the concierge at the front desk of your hotel and make them your best friend.

I must also note that Pack Up & Go put us up at the Pendry at their corporate rate, which is about half of the regular rate. I just checked to see how much rooms regularly go for, and it is a pretty pricey joint.

San Diego is lovely! Normally much warmer than it was this time, it’s probably tops on my list of where I’d flee if Georgia becomes a Nazi state like Florida. (This would be right after I won the PowerBall: like most of California, San Diego is crazy expensive.)

Double-check the dates of Comic-Con before you schedule your trip. That’s an extra 300,000 people you don’t want to have to deal with. Plus they’re dressed like Storm Troopers.

Old Town is a thumbs-up, particularly if you like Mexican food. We were not there when the Old Town Park village shops were open, but we’ll be there next year.

The hop-on/hop-off trolley is a good overview of the city.

We were constantly amazed at the fact that pedestrians literally have the right of way. Most of the intersections where we were are four-way stops, and drivers who pulled up even a fraction of a second before us would wave us on. We saw people just walk out into the street without looking, confident that cars would stop. And they do.

You can probably skip Coronado Island. It’s a lovely enclave, but it’s essentially shopping, and mostly shops that you have in your own area. I think we will go out to the Hotel Del Coronado just for the ambience, but the isle itself is skippable.

Little Italy is jam-packed with fine dining.

Uber is a great way to get around town. We never had to wait more than five minutes for a ride, and the drivers out there seem to have nicer cars than you. (Twice our Uber was a Tesla.)

The WNDR Museum is really cool!

The SAN DIEGO ZOO is reason enough to go to San Diego. It is probably one of our top ten places ever to have visited, and we will go back there next year.

Things we didn’t get to do this time that we’ll check out next time: Old Town Park village; the Museum of Art (and the other museums in Balboa Park); You & Yours Distilling; cocktail bars that we just didn’t get to; maybe Kansas City Barbeque, which we laughed at when we drove into town but which is the bar from the original Top Gun; the city’s trolley routes.

Go to Fifth & Rose for a cocktail and say hi to Cody for us.

After a rather better breakfast (at Achilles Coffee), we found ourselves at yet another street festival, the Chinese New Year celebration, complete with lion dancers…

…and a rather listless dragon. Come on kids, commit to the bit!

One feeds the lions with little red envelopes into which one has placed a little cash. The lion will then guarantee good luck for the coming year.

Here’s my Lovely First Wife feeding the purple lion.

In a fullscale parade, you can also feed the lions cabbage, which they will chew into little shreds and then spit back out onto you. This is also good luck. (They did this onstage.)

From there we went to the zoo.

The zoo. The San Diego Zoo. The world-famous San Diego Zoo. People, this place is worth the entire trip. It is absolutely amazing.

If you go to San Diego and do not go to the zoo, then you’ve done it wrong. You’ve wasted your whole trip.

Our plan had been to do the zoo then walk over to the Museum of Art. This was naive — we spent the whole day there and did not see all of it.

It is gorgeously designed.

It has kitties.

Several times we saw a big cat wake up or stop pacing and walk over to a specific spot — and a tour guide with a group would appear. Our guess is that like Abigail the Assistive Feline™ and Cecil the Pest™, they knew the schedule and perhaps had been coaxed there previously with treats.

Pro tip: Go down the Tiger Trail, wend your way about, and when you come to the large food court at station 13, under the Skyfari, head over to the tower, take the elevator up to the bridge, and cross over. We lucked into that path and were almost always walking downhill.

Ah, the bridge.

Remember my phobia of such things? Nope — that’s just over water. This thing didn’t bother me at all. (Coronado Bridge is also three or four times taller.)

The ring-tailed lemurs don’t live so much in family groups as in bundles:

It was chilly, so they huddled for warmth. But then the sun came out from behind a cloud, and sproing!

They literally snapped into little Buddhas to warm their tummies. We saw them do this a couple of times, and it was hysterical.

Here, have a cheetah doing a little blep with his tongue.

From the zoo we Ubered over to Old Town for a walking food tour, and it was a lot of fun after I figured out I had typed in the wrong address and we tracked the group down at the correct restaurant. Led by Dillon, it featured tacos, tequila, and history, including the second oldest graveyard in San Diego.

When they restored the place in the 1930s, the streets and sidewalks of course had claimed some of the area, so on the sidewalk you can see these:

Most of the grave markers are reconstructions, memorials of the person buried in that spot. This stone, however, is original:

A young wife who died at 21. I was struck by the verse, translated on a sign: “One and twenty times I saw the fields planted in flowers, I was young. I was called to God. Do not cry for me.”

We ended up in the Old Town Park, a kind of touristy reconstruction of what San Diego would have been like in the early days. We exited through the Fiesta del Reyes, where this lovely construction greeted us:

I took a photo to share with the hippies who participate in my March from the Dark Side at the burn.

We tried to eat lightly on this food tour, because we had reservations at Bencotto in Little Italy. There we failed to eat even half of the delicious pasta we were served, so we got to-go boxes and gave it to our Uber driver when we got back to the hotel.

Then we had fun. We went to the bar so I could have a farewell cocktail from bartender Cody, and there we met Juan. We had found Cody and the barstaff to be a warm and familial team, so it was unsurprising that other hospitality workers would gather there on a Sunday night for drinks and conviviality.

Juan was a waiter at Provisions, the hotel’s restaurant, and Juan was trying to figure out some things, namely how he was going to win the girl he liked, a fellow waiter. Juan had just broken up with his previous girlfriend (for the second and final time) and was agonizing over the situation. I and my Lovely First Wife then spent the next hour advising him.

We were joined by Niko from Greece, a guy from Spain whose name I didn’t catch, and finally a tall gentleman from Hamburg, who when we told him our son had studied in Munich gave the standard German response: Bavaria’s not really German. All of these guys were hospitality workers, and they clearly loved Juan and cared for him, eventually dragging him away to their next stop to start sobering him up.  (Juan had shown his gratitude for our kindness by gifting me not one but two shots of Monkey 47 gin, and he had been drinking before we got there.)

Juan claimed me as his grandfather — although he’s not that young and I’m not that old — and asked for my contact info. We told him we’d be back next year to check on him. Niko invited us to his grandmother’s house on an island in Greece, where she would make us fantastic seafood. When he said he had a 17-year-old daughter, I inquired about her college plans, and he practically exploded with pride: she wants to be a museum curator and has been accepted into three schools, including a full ride at Duquesne. The other guys agreed she was stellar. It was all extremely gemütlich. I loved it.

They left for more of their evening, and we said good-bye to Cody and headed up to bed.

It was a great day.

Is it only day two?

After breakfast at an establishment I will not name because it was amazingly lackluster, we headed to the first planned event of the day: a couples “romantic retreat” at the hotel’s spa. The spa itself was luxe, and the massage was welcome.

We headed out for lunch, but when we walked out of the hotel all of Fifth Ave was blocked off for a street fair.

Well, of course we had to shop. Earrings were bought. Lovely wooden sunglasses were bought.

I’ll try not to break these.

Next up, the hop-on-hop-off trolley that seems to infect major tourist cities. It took a while for us to connect: there’s the commercial trolley, and then there are multiple city-run trolleys, and when we checked at the front desk to find out where the trolley stop was, we decided we weren’t sure which one we had hooked up with.

So that took a while to sort out, and then we had to wait for a trolley, and that one was full, and we had to wait for the next one, and then we rode all around San Diego — downtown, Coronado Island, Little Italy, Old Town — which gave us a great overview for when we return next year. Because it was at the end of the trolley run’s day, we didn’t hop off, just stuck with it until we were deposited back at our stop.

You may not know this about me, but I have an irrational fear of heights over water. Heights? No problem; I can scamper out onto the promontories of Grand Canyon without missing a heartbeat. Water’s not a problem. But a tall bridge over water? I can’t breathe.

So you will appreciate the strength of will it took to take this photo:

I think that’s the Pacific Fleet. I couldn’t really pay attention.

Before the trolley, we had spent some time figuring out what to do for dinner. Pack Up & Go had booked us at a very nice (and very expensive) steak place that everyone raved about, but we were not in the mood for very expensive steaks, so eventually we opted just to go to the bar downstairs and have barfood with cocktails.

Our new best friend Cody was there. He made me a Bijou with barrel-aged gin, and then I asked him to make me something he had been working on for the menu. He lit up and presented me with a delicious drink, unnamed, containing tequila (San Diego is keen on tequila), Amaro Montenegro, and the secret ingredient of coconut — which I generally do not care for, but this drink was lovely.

SIDENOTE: You may recall that in the Bright Angel Lounge at Grand Canyon, we were treated to some ridiculous sportsball simulacra on the bar TVs. This time it was spikeball, and all I could think was, somewhere there are a couple of dudes who didn’t finish their degrees. Finally someone won that competition and ESPN switched over — and think about this carefully — the National Cornhole Championship JUNIOR, where definitely unathletic-looking young teens named Nick and Zackary and Noah tossed beanbags with fierce concentration.

We had no firm plans for the rest of the evening. The trolley driver had pointed out a dueling piano bar near us, but the Lovely First Wife was not in the mood, so we just strolled up Fifth Ave. The place was hopping with partying young persons, as is right and proper.

Then I saw these two windows that were alive with what appeared to be computer-generated lights floating about — and then it dawned on me that they were responding to us, the passersby. We had discovered the WNDR museum.

The first thing we thought of was that it was a kind of Meow Wolf, but it’s not quite. Meow Wolf is an immersive experience done by teams of largely anonymous artists. WNDR is an actual museum of individual artists’ work, mostly computer-visuals and mostly interactive.

For example, here’s a video of us experiencing two of the pieces, the entrance hall and Quantum Mirror (by Adrian Stein).

Right?

One exhibit allowed you to type in AI prompts, and five screens then displayed the results. When we walked in, the work on display was “Bob Ross boxing.”

I gave it the prompt “Yoda at Burning Man,” and the results were a bit lackluster.

Still, A for effort.

Another favorite was Inside Out, by Studio Leigh Sachwitz. From the website’s description: “An immersive 360° video, light, and sound experience based on childhood memories of artist Leigh Sachwitz, who often experienced thunderstorms in a Glasgow garden shed. Leigh was inspired by those moments in Scottish weather where even phases of rain and sunshine can be experienced together within 20 minutes.”

Up to four people could sit in the garden chair inside the shed during the light/sound show. There was a line to get in, but the experience was just as lovely from the outside as it was inside. I particularly liked the ending sequence, where the stark black-and-white geometric patterns gave way to dawn-like colors that gently spread and faded.

One simple exhibit — the name of which I did not record and the website does not have, was a spare room with some designs on the wall and a small pattern on the floor that clearly invited you to stand on. The wall had a prominent light switch: ON/OFF. This is what happened when you flipped the switch:

This photo is not filtered. We were suddenly in a black-and-white/sepia-toned universe.

There was a lot more of course, but that’s the gist of it. Fun place, highly recommended.

After that, we stopped by the creperie for a late meal, and then to bed.

And we’re off!

The Pendry is located in the Gaslamp District:

No, I don’t know why it’s called the Gaslamp District, nor has anyone offered an explanation. It certainly gives off that aura of being a tourist center, does it not? And given our stated preference for fine dining, craft cocktails, and artsy stuff, we set off to explore the neighborhood to find these things and start mapping out our dining plans, etc.

Oddly, there did not seem to be many especially fine dining places, nor craft cocktail bars. There were plenty of restaurants, but most of them were solid but basic kinds of places, and most places seemed to be beer kinds of places rather than great cocktails. It was a puzzlement, until we saw…

Petco Park. Home of the Padres. Who have never won a national championship (I learned from our handout; no team from San Diego ever has). The Gaslamp District is a sportsball district.

And artsy stuff? Nada.

Not a problem. We know how to find what we want. We retired to the Pendry’s Fifth & Rose bar, which does serve craft cocktails, for a mid-afternoon tipple and a chat with the bartender, Cody.

I had the Smoke & Mirrors (by Shane, who joined us anon): mezcal, Amaro Montenegro, sweet vermouth, and a house blended smoke and salt bitters. It was very tasty.

I’ve learned by now that if you’re unfamiliar with the city and want to know where the most interesting cocktails are, all you have to do is find a bar that serves those kinds of things and you ask the bartender where the other great bars are.

So of course Cody was able to give us a quick list of places to check out. I’ll report back.

The good folk at Pack Up & Go had scheduled us for a neat little pasta-making class for dinner, but while we rested back in the room — all right, we took a nap — I did some checking about and discovered that the Old Globe Theatre had a show that night: The Notebooks of Leonardo daVinci, conceived and constructed by Mary Zimmerman.

Mary Zimmerman, you may recall, was the deviser of Metamorphoses, a kaleidoscopic adaptation of Ovid’s masterpiece, performed in a shallow pool. Half dance, half spectacle, all amazing — we saw it at Chicago’s Lookingglass Theater — and so our evening plans did not involve making pasta, which we already know how to do anyway.

I found us a restaurant near the theatre, Parc Bistro-Brasserie, called the pasta place to let them know we weren’t coming, and off we went. (Another factor in our decision was that we already know how to make our own pasta. As one does.)

Parc is a first-rate French restaurant. Our waiter was in fact a rather handsome Frenchman, charming and personable, and the food was excellent. No, I didn’t take photos. (Their barrel-aged Manhattan was also excellent.)

Our travel package included a $50 gift card for Uber, so we snagged a driver to get us to the theatre, which is in Balboa Park, a vast complex of museums.

The Old Globe:

The poster:

The show:

The entire show is simply the words of da Vinci as he scribbled them down in the thousands and thousands of pages he left behind. It is mind-boggling in its construction and staging. See all those filing cabinet drawers that make up the walls of the set? They were ladders, drawers, display cabinets, set pieces. (More photos here.)

Da Vinci’s work and insatiable curiosity were on full display, as was his sometime pettiness: the sequence where he disses sculptors (i.e., Michelangelo, whom we’ve just heard two women drooling over as a bella uomo) was hysterical.

We left the theatre flabbergasted. I was sincerely moved by the man’s insights and humanity. “While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die.” So say we all.

We snagged another Uber home and went straight to bed like any elderly couple up way past their bedtime.

And we’re off!

It’s already been an adventure: we had only gotten to the corner before we had to turn around to go fetch someone’s science magic watch, the one that tells her how many steps to take or something, that we had forgotten somehow.

Where are we going, you ask?

I had suspected that we might be headed there, but the revised forecast for the weekend seemed very cold for San Diego. (Hold that thought.) The irony is that we already planned to come here next year for The Great Cut 2024, so this will serve as a scouting mission.

The packet from packupgo.com is pretty nifty: It includes our hotel reservation, reservations at a couple of restaurants, a food tour, and a reservation at the hotel spa. There are also lists of things to do and places to eat, all within walking distance. (The Pendry San Diego is in the Gaslamp District.)

The flight was miserable — as is always the case these days — but uneventful. We snagged a cab and headed into town, where our room was ready. We ditched our stuff and headed out to get lunch, which we did at The Melt, a good little burger joint around the corner.

We have now retreated to the hotel to plan out our weekend. (My Lovely First Wife [pictured above] has been frustrated that she has no Top 10 book on which to rely; she’s had to meander, you guys.)

More later. The main thing you need to know is that I’m wearing pants because it was supposed to be cold, and it is not.