Sunday, October 7, 2012

Beach Scenes

by Pa Rock
Road Warrioring.

It is an absolutely beautiful day in southern California.  I drove south to Imperial Beach for breakfast at a McDonald's this morning.  Imperial Beach is a rundown beachfront community that appears to have been on the skids since the 1960's - but I sort of like it and enjoy going there.  A few years ago Showtime or HBO had a short-lived series called John from Cincinnati which was supposedly set in IB.  It is the type of place where people seem as apt to live in motel rooms and cars as they do in regular housing, but there are many nice small homes, and a couple of big schools - and lots and lots of beachfront on the Pacific.  I heard today that the community will soon be getting a luxury hotel and a new Wal-Mart - which sounds like it is pulling the the wagon in two distinct directions.

After breakfast I drove to Harbor Island where I met Aunt Mary.  She insisted on driving, so I was a willing tourist the rest of the day.   We drove up onto Point Loma which juts out into the Pacific.  There we visited the immense military cemetery and my Uncle Wayne's grave.   From his gravesite you can see all of San Diego and Coronado.  Then we headed north through the beach communities of Ocean Beach (where Aunt Mary and Uncle Wayne lived the first time that I was in San Diego in 1955), Mission Beach, Pacific Beach, La Jolla (where the Romney's are tearing down a perfectly good home and building a better one), and finally Del Mar where we had lunch.  It was a wonderfully scenic drive and gave us lots of quality time for visiting.

One thing that I learned about my still very pretty Aunt Mary today is that she used to be a fashion model.  She showed me several hotels and stores today were she modeled back in the day.  She is also a very talented painter, and she told me today that she did one mural on a fence in La Jolla that was twenty-five feet long.  The woman who commissioned it wanted to be able to see the ocean from her house, so Aunt Mary was hired to paint a beach scene!

This evening I am going to get out and explore the Naval Amphibious Base where I am staying.  I noticed that the Commander for Surface Activities in the Pacific has his offices right behind the building that I am staying in.    Later I may also go back down to Imperial Beach and walk along the ocean.

We don't have much ocean front in Phoenix!    Not yet, anyway.

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