The appalling heat continues. But today is Wednesday, which of course means quilting day, both at home with my guild, Quilters Anonymous, and with my small group, Seattle Quilt Troupe, and also here in San Diego with my friend Laurine’s group, Group Therapy. They have been quilting together for 22 years, a fairly long time, although not as long as the QTs, who have quilted together every Wednesday for 33 years.

I was at Laurine’s by 8:15am, and she drove us to the home of her friend Sharyn who this month is hosting their group’s Wednesday meetings. Sharyn happens to be an internationally known and highly regarded quilting teacher, designer, and author; in 1985 she was named Quilt Teacher of the Year by Professional Quilter magazine. Now she is mostly retired, although like all true teachers she continues to create and to share with all those who want to learn.

After welcoming us with fresh fruit and a baked treat to her beautifully decorated and comfortable home, Sharyn took us upstairs to her sewing room to show us several designs and techniques that she has been working on.

I was especially taken with a flower-appliqué, basket-bordered design she’s come up with. Everything about it is extraordinary, from the background fabric to the appliqué to the flower block sashing intersections to the basket border.

Her sewing room is likewise fabulous.

We sewed the morning away, some on machines, others on handwork. I hand-sewed the binding onto a baby quilt that I made for my nephew Mike’s third baby and will be giving to him this weekend. Sewing in any quilting group is like breathing to me, breathing extra-oxygenated, extra-sweet air. Quilts from the quilt show that I went to last week were being returned, one of them a favorite of mine at the show: a friendship quilt made by Margret with contributions from all the members of the group.

Later back at Laurine’s home she showed me several stunning projects she is working on. I took a photo of her in her delightful sewing room:

See, Patrick? – compared to Sharyn and Laurine, I don’t have nearly enough fabric!

We’ve been looking forward to getting together with my Aunt Marti and my cousins Dan (F/K/A Danny) and Cindy. When I was growing up in El Segundo, Uncle Bob was stationed for six years at Edwards Air Force Base about 80 miles away, and we visited a lot back and forth. Then later, after he retired from the Air Force, they lived even closer, in Studio City. We always had fun with our cousins because we’re close in age, Dan a year younger than I and Cindy a year younger than Peps.

Aunt Marti invited us, and Peps who is currently living in nearby Leucadia, for dinner Tuesday night at her home in San Marcos. A devoted Air Force wife, she’s always been the consummate hostess (she hosted my bridal shower back in 1970) and sets a lovely table.

We talked and laughed and caught up with one another for several hours, and enjoyed a wonderful stroganoff dinner.

So how are we doing with our bicycling? It’s been really, really hot here, unusually so, and even more abnormally it’s been humid due to several successive hurricanes out in the Pacific. As a result we’ve had some gorgeous sunsets, coinciding with a “supermoon.”

I HATE being hot. Nevertheless, we’ve been riding our bikes every day, usually in the evening, either down the Strand toward Imperial Beach or north to Coronado. It’s so fun!

Almost every day we’ve been back to the bike shop, where we’ve spent enough money to become good buddies with an excellent young salesman named Jacob. Today Patrick got a much more comfortable ride with a bigger, springier seat, taller handlebar post, and bigger foot pedals for his size 15 feet.

On our way up to Coronado, we ride past the Navy Amphibious Base, where the Seals train, and often we see the amphibious teams hard at their training. Today we saw some over on the ocean side carrying their boats, apparently after an amphibious landing in the surf,

and another group setting out with M-16 rifles and heavy packs in this horrible heat. Bless them!

Late yesterday afternoon we got the word that our bikes were ready and drove up to pick them up. They are perfect, exactly what we wanted.

Here’s the deal about these Electra Townie bikes (which are not electric – that’s just the company name): the key feature is the ergonomic Flat Foot Technology, where the crank and pedals are located not at the bottom of the seat post but moved forward a bit. This means that your sitting position is angled back 23% (in the direction of a recumbent bike), so you’re sitting upright, not hunched over. You can see the world better, pedaling is easier, and you can readily place your feet flat on the ground whenever you want. It’s a completely different riding experience, so comfortable. The frames are lightweight aluminum and the components are high quality – what’s not to love?

Patrick’s bike is a red men’s 7D, which means a Shimano 7-speed derailleur and front and rear linear-pull brakes. In this model he was able to order a Tall frame, so for the first time he has a bike that actually fits his 6-foot, 4-inch body.

Mine is a burgundy step-through Balloon 8i, which means it has balloon tires, 8 gears, and Shimano Nexus internal hubs instead of a derailleur. I wasn’t sure I wanted the balloon tires, but I definitely wanted the internal-hub shifter (which came only on the model with the balloon tires). My experience with derailleurs is that the chain tends to slip, and this internal hub is supposed to be much more reliable (and looks cleaner). It also has roller brakes built into the hub, so no brake pads clenching the tires. The balloon tires are high-volume, low-pressure Kevlar Guard premium tires that absorb impact with less rolling resistance for a smooth, cushy ride with added protection against the dreaded flat. If I don’t like them, I can change them out.

I have great existential fear about riding a bike, that it will break down and I’ll be stranded and unable to fix it. Friends tell me not to worry, someone will come along and help me. No doubt that’s true and not a problem for extraverts, but for an introvert like me, having to solicit the kindness and expertise of strangers would be even worse than being broken down and stranded. So I want a very reliable bike, even though I will mostly be riding alongside my favorite, über-competent mechanic.

After tooling around the RV park a bit last night, this morning we took our first bike ride: up the Silver Strand to Holland’s Bike Shop in Coronado, where we spent a very enjoyable hour or so choosing additional accessories.

We rode a little on Orange Ave, the main drag, and had a very nice lunch at the Tent City Café. (Tent City means something different in Coronado than in Seattle: after the Hotel Del Coronado was built in 1888, a tourist/vacation area of tents (later replaced by cottages) was established just south of the hotel.) Not wanting to overdo on our first day, we estimate that we rode about 7 or so miles up to Coronado and back to the RV park, and then Patrick attached all our accessories.

Now I have: a basket, a water cage inside the basket, a mirror on the end of the handlebars, a pretty leather case for small items, a bell with a compass on it, an odometer, head and tail lights, a tire pump, a Kryptonite lock, and a daisy (for “Daisy”).

Patrick got: a bell, a mirror on the end of the handlebars, an iPhone bracket, a tire repair kit, head and tail lights, a lock, a rack over the back tire, and panniers.

We’re very well outfitted!

For the engineers in the audience (you know who you are) – Specs for my bike:
• Lightweight 6061-t6 aluminum frame
• Shimano Nexus internal 8-speed w/freewheel
• Shimano nexus twist shifter
• Shimano nexus roller brakes w/cooling fins
• Painted alloy rims
• Schwalbe fat frank 26”x 2.35” tires

Specs for Patrick’s bike:
• Tall Sized – Lightweight 6061-t6 aluminum frame
• Shimano tx-35 7-speed w/megarange gearing
• Shimano revo twist shifter
• Forged alloy crankset w/44t chainring & dual guards
• Alloy linear-pull brakes
• Painted alloy fenders
• Double-wall alloy rims
• 26”x 2.0” semi-slick street tires

We ordered our bicycles. Now they are all we can think about, their features, their colors, when exactly they’ll be put together and ready for us, what they’ll feel like to ride, where we’ll go on them. My bike already has a name because last night I had a dream about her: she was racing around, having adventures, and she kept changing from a bike to a dog and back to a bike again. I recognized the dog: it was Daisy, Grandpa’s hunting dog from the 1940s and ’50s. I never knew Daisy, but I saw photos and I always heard her spoken of with great fondness. Somehow the spirit of Daisy has gotten into my new bike, so Daisy is her name too.

Meanwhile, we’ve done a few things while we’re waiting. Yesterday we went to the local movie theater on Coronado Island, called the Village Theatre.

It’s a cute little place, the opposite of a multiplex, with three screens in smallish rooms – our room had 4 rows of 10 seats each. The décor and maintenance are exceptional! The movie we saw was “The Hundred-Foot Journey” with the incomparable Helen Mirren (unless you want to compare her with the equally incomparable Meryl Streep). The young stars, Manish Dayal and French-Canadian actress Charlotte Le Bon, were beyond adorable. Loved the movie, although we should have brought more Kleenex.

This morning at 6:30 we woke up to the sound of artillery! 50-caliber machine guns and mortars that went on for hours. We usually hear colors at 8am from Naval Base San Diego at 32nd Street across the bay, but this barrage was from the beach to the west of us, which is a Navy Amphibious Base Coronado training area. Don’t know what they were doing exactly, but I found this photo on the web that shows what I imagine from what we heard:

After that wake-up call, I headed downtown for the 33rd annual San Diego Quilt Show at the Convention Center. Although not as large as our Quilters Anonymous show up in Monroe, there were over 400 quilts, lots of vendors, and lots of nice quilting ladies thronging the aisles. My favorite was a small art quilt called “Mondrian Improv,” by Carol Sebastian-Neely:

Quilters in 19th-century costume from the Old Town Quilters’ Guild were demonstrating making quilts entirely by hand – a novel idea for many of today’s quilters. They meet once a week in Old Town and sit outside showing passers-by the old skills. I had the pleasure of sitting with them for an hour to put in some stitches on a quilt they had there in a frame.

Made from an unknown design (which looked to me like it had Pennsylvania Dutch influences), the quilt is a replica of what’s believed to be the earliest surviving quilt made in California, sewn in the 1850s by one of San Diego’s most influential early citizens, Señora Juana Machado.

As part of my relentless quest to visit all the major league baseball parks, tonight we went to a San Diego Padres game at Petco Park.

The Padres were the first Major League baseball team I ever saw play, back in 1971, in the third year of this expansion franchise when they played out in Mission Valley in San Diego Stadium (later rebuilt into the current San Diego Chargers Qualcomm football stadium).

Petco is 10 years old and is generally considered one of the best stadiums in baseball. It’s right downtown, in cozy confines on Harbor Blvd, across from the Convention Center. The aesthetics are outstanding, with a lot of interesting adobe-colored and -textured surfaces, even to the stall dividers in the bathrooms. As you walk in, you go up an escalator viewing water falling over beautiful sand-colored slate. Concourses are wide and varied in design, and there are palm trees in center field and ivy hanging from overpasses above.

Because the footprint of the stadium is small, there’s a lot of overhang of the upper tiers of seats, but the vertical spacing is sufficient that people in the seats below the overhangs don’t feel shadowed or squashed (although the trade-off is that the nose-bleed seats are pretty far from the field).

One unusual feature is the 1910 brick Western Metal Supply warehouse on the third base side. Listed on the National Historic Register, it couldn’t be demolished for the stadium so it was gutted and repurposed: a team store, suites with balconies overlooking the field, and a bar & grill. It doesn’t have the gravitas of the B&O warehouse in Baltimore, but it’s interesting to look at and a nice nod to downtown history.

The food is, of course, a vital consideration at any ballpark, and I rate Petco high on food. I usually test the dogs, and my Italian sausage with grilled peppers & onions was excellent.

Patrick went for the BBQ ribs and found them to be pretty good, although not outstanding.

There is a tremendous variety of food to choose from, including an area with deli salads and fresh fruit. I have to say, though, that I didn’t see many people in there: who goes to the ballgame to eat grapefruit?

They may even have overdone the number of craft beer booths. But perhaps beer can’t actually be overdone at a ballpark.

We walked around the concourse and came across a large scale model of the USS Midway (CV-41), complete with model airplanes on the flight deck. The Padres honor the military (especially the Navy) in a number of ways, including offering military discounts on all seats and incorporating camouflage design into their players’ uniforms. We also found the “Park in the Park” area beyond the center field fence, with a 10-foot statue of Padres great Tony Gwynn, a miniature baseball field where kids can play (and were playing) ball, and a sort of grassy knoll, similar to the ones you see at Spring Training parks, where families were sitting on blankets; seats there cost $5. Nice amenity!

And yet – and yet – I can’t give a hearty thumbs-up to the stadium. The design has one major, and to me fatal, flaw: you can really comfortably watch the game only from your assigned seat. As you walk around the concourses, your view of the game is blocked by various structures between you and the game – bathrooms, concession stands, restaurant areas restricted to high-priced ticketholders, and who knows what all; mostly you’re looking at blank walls.

At our superior Safeco Field, as you’re walking around, you can always see the game. You’re standing in line for a dog and hear a cheer swell from the crowd, you have only to turn around to see what’s happening on the field. And in addition, on two levels in left field you have “leaning” counters to stop and watch for, say, half an inning (including next to the bullpens, so you can offer helpful advice to the relief pitchers warming up), and in center field you have meet & flirt areas with stand-up tables for singles to mingle and still see the game.

Other minor negatives: The song played during the 7th inning stretch after Take Me Out to the Ball Game is ideal for dancing: Twist and Shout – but no one danced. Get moving, fans! We were sitting on the third base line, just past the visiting dugout, and the seats were nicely oriented toward the battery. But the big screen is just inside the left-field line, so we couldn’t see it without craning our necks uncomfortably around to the left. And the mascot – I’m sorry, but the “Swinging Friar,” complete with tonsure, is just a little creepy.

As the Padres haven’t done well yet this decade, the crowd was sparse, even including a lot of Arizona Diamondback fans taking a break from the desert heat of Phoenix. But in a nail-biter, the Padres did beat the Diamondbacks 2-1 with a walk-off home run in the bottom of the 9th.

One of the things we like about visiting San Diego is that we have family and friends living here. Although we had decided to lie low for Labor Day weekend (to avoid the thundering herd of people making for the beaches, where we are camped), we did venture out on Sunday to meet our good friends Warrie and Laurie for dinner at Point Loma Seafoods, a local landmark since 1963.

Point Loma Seafoods began selling fish out of a small store with one small display case, setting exacting standards of quality and freshness and filleting fish for sport fisherman. Then they started smoking and processing both sport-caught fish and fish for retail sales,

then hot food such as chowder in fresh sourdough bread bowls. The business grew, the building grew, and now it’s a busy operation where you can buy both an amazing variety of fresh fish and also dinner.

Where we were sitting eating our dinner,

we could watch the fishing charter boats coming in from their day of fishing. Very pretty scene, good company, and happy fisher people.

On Tuesday, we went to REI to buy colored paracord for the fancy knot-tying that Patrick has begun to do. While we were there we started looking at bicycles. We’ve been thinking for some time about buying bikes to ride around the various places we camp. Lots of RVers have them, and it seems as though riding bikes would be both fun and good exercise for us. We found a brand we really liked, Electra Townies, so we’re going to look further into those.

Then Patrick wanted to take me to Seaport Village for lunch, which I hadn’t been to before. It’s a waterfront complex of 70 shops, galleries, and eateries on the Bay in downtown, touristy of course (glad we weren’t there yesterday!) but in a great location south of the Midway Museum. It was built on landfill over Punta de los Muertos (“Point of the Dead”), where the Spanish expedition of 1782 buried those who had died of scurvy. Appetizing!

We ate lunch at Sally’s Seafood on the Water, which extends out into the Bay and seems indoors but is mostly open air to the extent of having birds walking on the floor and flying around.

I had a wonderful parmesan-encrusted tilapia with some sort of delicious caper sauce. Most amazing was the waterfront view: suddenly our window was filled with a huge Navy amphibious assault ship, the USS Essex (LHD-2), headed out to sea.

I had recovered from my slight illness by this morning, so we set out for the U.S. Sand Sculpting Challenge and 3D Art Exposition, held on the cruise ship terminal pier where our Panama Canal cruise ship docked this past February. No cruise ships this weekend – the pier was covered with mounds of sand being sculpted into amazing forms before our eyes.

Professional sculptors and sand artists came from places such as Latvia, Singapore, The Netherlands, Portugal, and Canada, as well as from the U.S. I heard one of them being interviewed on the radio, and she said she particularly likes sculpting in sand as opposed to hard materials like marble because it’s so warm and responsive. There were all sorts of themes, not all of them nautical: one was of a truck, with the actual truck it was based on parked behind. I liked this one, an homage to the local metro bus service:

They’re short-lived, though: one we saw had a serious crack that was being patched, and it looked as though cracking is a hazard that comes with the sand drying out. Some of the artists hadn’t even started their sculptures yet, probably for that reason. The judging will take place tomorrow, but this one was my favorite:

We wandered up the Embarcadero and came next to the Festival of Sail, a tall ship festival hosted at the Maritime Museum of San Diego. A street fair was going on in front of the ships, and we found some yummy lunch: a gyro for Carol, tri-tip barbeque for Patrick.

The Maritime Museum is housed in the Berkeley, one of several ferryboats that for sixty years operated on San Francisco Bay between the Oakland pier and the San Francisco ferry building.

In 1958 ferry service on San Francisco Bay was ended and she became a gift shop docked in Sausalito. In 1973 she was towed to San Diego and restored for service as the main “building” of the Maritime Museum. Berkeley was notable for having been the first propeller-driven ferry on the west coast, and at the time of her launching in 1898 she was the largest commuter ferryboat in the United States with a 1700-passenger capacity. She was also remarkable for being one of the earliest ferries to be powered by a triple-expansion steam engine; we went below, and the docent there started it up and turned it over for Patrick to watch.

The Maritime Museum preserves one of the largest collections of historic sea vessels in the United States. The centerpiece of the museum’s collection is the Star of India, which we went aboard. She was built in 1863, a full-rigged iron windjammer ship.

After a full career sailing from Great Britain to India and New Zealand, she became a hauler on the Alaska-to-California route. Retired in 1926, she was restored in 1962-63 and is now again a seaworthy vessel, the oldest iron-hulled merchant ship still floating. Unlike many preserved or restored vessels, her hull, cabins and equipment are nearly 100% original. We went almost down to the hull and Patrick had me listen to hear the sound of snapping shrimp on the outside of the hull. The captain’s stateroom was very fancy compared with the sailors’ berthing spaces, and the toilet areas were dreadful. I would not have wanted to live in any era before modern plumbing.

We also crawled through the research submarine Dolphin – no chubby sailors could have worked there!

We went aboard the HMS Surprise, not a restoration but a 1970 replica designed to look like a 1757 20-gun Royal Navy frigate. It looked like a pirate ship and in fact appeared in the movie “Master and Commander” and one of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies. Costumed docents explained how various things on the ship worked, and Patrick got detailed instruction on shooting the cannons.

From the deck of the Surprise we watched a spirited cannon battle between two sailing ships, anachronistically staged in front of the nuclear aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan (CVN-76), docked at North Island Naval Air Station.

After all this walking and battling under a hot sun, we were pretty tuckered out and hired a pedicab to take us back to our car.

After the Dodger game on Sunday, we picked up Peps from Manhattan Beach and he spent that night with us at the beach, Cheryl having moved on to the home of other friends. Peps had just finished serving as support crew for his friend Todd in the Catalina Classic Paddleboard Race. This is the 39th consecutive year of the 32-mile marathon, which attracts paddlers from all over the world and is known as the ‘Grand-Daddy of all Paddleboard Races.’ It begins at Isthmus Cove, Catalina Island, and ends at the Manhattan Beach Pier, and Peps and his friends had been on Catalina for several days prepping for the race.

Out of a hundred competitors, Todd came in third!

On Tuesday, we left Playa del Rey and headed south to San Diego. We are now camped at one of our favorite places, Fiddler’s Cove FamCamp just south of Coronado Island.

There are so many military installations in this area that I had assumed this ribbon of land that connects Coronado Island to Imperial Beach to the south was built for military purposes. But no. Coronado is what’s called a tied island, an island that is connected to land by a tombolo, a spit of beach materials connected to land at both ends.

Tombolos are formed by wave refraction: as waves near an island, they are slowed by the shallow water surrounding it. These waves then refract or bend around the island to the opposite side as they approach. The wave pattern created by this water movement causes a convergence of longshore drifting on the opposite side of the island, and the beach sediments that are moving by lateral transport on the lee side of the island will accumulate there. In other words, the waves sweep sediment together from both sides. Eventually, when enough sediment has built up, the beach shoreline, known as a spit, will connect with the island and form a tombolo. (Until 2007, Martha’s Vineyard and Chappaquiddick Island were connected by a tambolo called Norton Point Beach. In April 2007, a strong storm breached the beach and the two islands became separated by a 300-yard channel.)

However, the connection between Coronado and North Island Naval Air Station IS man-made by the military: originally Coronado was separated from North Island by a shallow channel called the Spanish Bight. Development of North Island by the Navy during World War II led to the filling of the bight by July 1944, combining the land areas into a single body.

I started not feeling well on the drive down and spent a couple of days lying low on the couch, during which time we did laundry, bought groceries, and saw a couple of free movies at the base theater. Feeling better now.

I grew up near L.A. and went to hundreds of my brothers’ Little League and American Legion baseball games, learned how to score a baseball game at my mother’s knee, and love the game, but I’ve never been to a Dodger game at Chavez Ravine. Until today.

Of course when I was growing up, there was no money for professional entertainment. But a few times my dad got Dodger tickets at work from a vendor, and I know at least once he got four tickets and took my 3 brothers; Peps remembers that he may have gotten 2 tickets other times and took Mike, who was a huge fan of the Dodgers, especially Maury Wills. I don’t think it occurred to anyone that I might like to go, and it’s ironic that now I’m the only one in the family who follows baseball.

As a follow-on to the reunion, I organized a small group to go to a Dodger game the next day, six of us to be exact: Cheryl, Vonnie, Jim, Jim’s college friend John (whom we called the “player to be named later” until we met him today and learned his name), Patrick, and me. John is visiting all the major league ball parks, like we are, and is a good baseball guy; we graciously overlooked the fact that he’s a Yankee fan.

Dodger Stadium is now the third-oldest baseball park in the country (after Fenway and Wrigley), opened in 1962. Its setting is stunning, nestled into Chavez Ravine near downtown L.A.

To construct the stadium, the tops of local ridges were removed and the soil was used to fill in two other ravines to provide a level surface for the stadium and the parking lot. An elementary school that had served the mostly Hispanic residents who were evicted to build the stadium was simply buried and sits beneath the parking lot northwest of third base. The way you get to the stadium is by way of a sort of corkscrew drive winding up the outside of the ravine; a unique terraced-earthworks parking lot behind the main stands allows fans to park at roughly the level of their seats, minimizing use of ramps once inside. The stadium was also designed to be earthquake-resistant, and it has withstood several serious earthquakes. The views of the field from the concourses are surprisingly fan-friendly for such an old park.

Food and drink report: the much-touted “Dodger dogs” are below average, and there’s almost nothing else to eat; hamburgers, pizza, and snacks were all we found, and we weren’t in the cheap seats. Vonnie, a long-time St. Louis fan, was disappointed not to find any brats. At Safeco Field we can choose from Asian food, clam chowder, salmon fish & chips, carved roast beef & turkey sandwiches, Shiskaberries (chocolate-dipped strawberries on a stick), healthy organic food, tacos & burritos etc., pasta, salad, numerous barbeque dishes, cheesesteak sandwiches, hamburgers, dogs of many kinds, pizza, and of course various snacks like pretzels, ice cream, wine, nuts, candy, and espresso; in addition there’s the sit-down Hit It Here Café in right field, where you can sit for a short time or for the whole game, dining from a chef-prepared menu. I would rate the food at Dodger Stadium as lame.

But there was one drink option that we had heard of and sought out: frozen-foam-topped Kirin beer. A plastic cup of ice-cold beer is topped with a swirl of frozen beer foam, which seeps into the beer below, keeping your brew cold. The foam is beer, pure beer, agitated in a machine and flash-frozen to 23 degrees to act as insulation, designed to keep the liquid beneath cool on a hot day at the ballpark. I can attest that it was a hot day and that my beer stayed absolutely cold down to the bottom, and then there was this nice, cold beer foam to suck up. I thought it was great! but at $11 a cup, I don’t expect to drink another one soon. I think Jim, being more of a beer aficionado than I am, was less enthusiastic.

This being a California ballpark, there were beach balls loose in the stands for much of the game.

Somewhat annoying, but not as bad as those incessant Jedi-light-sabre-like clackers at the Oakland Coliseum.

Oh, and the game? The Dodgers lost 3-11 to the Mets. Too bad for the fans, but the Dodgers are still in first place in the National League West and we didn’t care much anyway; none of us has a dog in that hunt.