We took a trip to San Diego a couple of weekends ago, for Helen’s Epilepsy conference. Helen has an interesting, albeit morbid, hotel metric … jump-ability. Our hotel, an Embassy Suites, has a large 12 story interior courtyard, so scored pretty high on that metric!
And it had exterior balconies as well. This is the view we had of the retired aircraft carrier Midway:
Launched in 1945, it was the US 41st carrier. I did some research before I spent most of a day touring it. It was in service for 50 years, refurbished twice. The last carrier built a few years ago, USS George Bush, number 77, cost $6 billion. The next, USS Gerald Ford, will cost $13 billion, ‘ships’ next year.
The Midway was the carrier that made the news at the end of the Vietnam war, when the captain ordered $10 million of Huey helicopters pushed overboard into the sea to make room for an emergency landing of a Cessna with a fleeing Vietnamese family. The flight deck is now a museum full of all kinds of interesting aircraft:
I sat in the captain’s chair, in the tower high up above the deck. The captain also had the only bed up there so he could get to that chair quickly when needed:
This was one of a bunch of briefing rooms for the pilots. The ship holds over 100 planes, so each type of plane had it’s own group of pilots. This was the ‘top gun’ room for the hot shot fighter jet pilots:
The chip is a floating city, supporting over 4000 sailors. So buried in the bowels of the chip you could find a room for anything and everything, including a post office with its own zip code. This is the dental office, supporting 5 dentists:
In the deepest part of the chip was the brig … this guy has been there quite a while:
The most impressive rooms were the Admiral's quarters. He had the biggest bed and conference rooms, including this impressive control room from where much of the Iraq war was coordinated. Here I am pretending to be the Admiral, trying to cancel the war, but it didn’t work, the jets kept taking off. I guess simulated planes don’t listen as well as real ones:
San Diego was where navel aviation, including the carrier, was invented. The also have a big city park I tourist-ed which has this air and space museum:
If you look closely in the above photo, you can see a live jet flirting with the 2 dead ones on the ground. The San Diego airport is the busiest single-runway airport in the country, and it is right next to downtown. So there are jets constantly overhead within spitting distance. I had fun trying to take their pictures:
I also took a harbor tour:
And met some handsome pelicans:
Helen mostly attended the conference. Once she did escape and got cornered at a local mall by a very effective kiosk salesman who sold her some sort of magic nail polish from the Dead Sea. Anyone who comes to visit us, be warned you will likely leave with shiny fingernails. I only let her do one hand, so I could measure how long it lasted (about 1 week):
Salt Lake City downtown is much more active now than it was when we were looking for a house 2 years ago (just 2 years ago??). This is mostly because of the $2 billion dollar ‘City Creek’ re-development they did downtown. It includes a Macys, which has a xmas window display with massive candy sculptures:
The LDS Temple Square is beautifully lit up:
One of the LDS visitor centers has a large statue of Jesus. You can see it in the background here, with the 3 wise men in the foreground admiring just how big Jesus has grown (literally and figuratively):
I finished installing our motorized curtains last week! 12 upstairs and 3 downstairs:
Cellular blinds are really slick. When opened, they have only a small 3” stack at the top of the window that blocks very little. With our massive windows, we probably could have blocked quite a bit and not really suffered, but we are now pretty spoiled by the amazing view:
