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.