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.