San Diego - Briefly!

After toasted cinnamon bagels for me and waffles for Chris (which he made himself), we left our bags at Reception and headed across the road (no jaywalking of course) to the Waterfront and historic ships.

Amazingly, the first one we saw, "The Star of India", was built in the Isle of Man in 1863, and is the oldest active sailing ship in the world. Further along was USS Midway, the longest serving US aircraft carrier of the 20th century (1945-1992), whilst nearby was a 'megayacht' called 'Launchpad', which I discovered was built and launched this year for Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook etc) at a cost of 300 million dollars. In front of that was 'Wingman', a vessel that could easily belong to the villain in a James Bond movie, and which was used to house his staff, at a cost of 30 million dollars! 

I guess 'Wingman' was chosen as a name for its 'Top Gun' reference, as we later sought out the bar used by the film's naval aviators, which featured Maverick and Goose playing/singing 'Great balls of Fire' on the piano. The film cemented Chris's ambition to be a military pilot rather than a commercial one!

After a pizza and Peroni in Little Italy - it represents Downtown San Diego’s oldest continuous-neighborhood business district. At one time, more than 6,000 Italian families lived in Little Italy and toiled to build San Diego into the center of the world’s tuna industry - we caught an Uber back to the Airport to collect our hire car; a brand, new white automatic Buick Envista. We headed out somewhat petrified (me anyway) into the multiple lanes of chaos known as northbound Interstate 15 to Los Angeles, which makes Spaghetti junction look like a B-road!