Today, I took my first trip aboard Amtrak, the super long-distance train company! Well, even though I missed my first train because the signs at Union Station weren’t very helpful, within an hour, I was back on board and heading for sunny San Diego!
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I really enjoy travel by train, actually. It may even be nicer than plane travel, at least for trips within two hundred miles. There are no rules for seat backs, tray tables, cell phones, or moving about the cabin. There is even a café on board in case a beaver gets the munchies en route to the destination! Oh, and the route is appropriately named the Pacific Surfliner, which goes along the Pacific coast with beautiful views of the ocean!
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My destination on this particular day was Old Town, San Diego, a place so rich in history that it has been turned into a State Historic Park! Unfortunately, I was in a particular bit of a hurry today on my quest to see the many Historical Landmarks in Old Town that I must stick to the highlights, starting with Presidio Park!
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This pretty building is actually the Junipero Serra Museum seated in the middle of the park, which is the official birthplace of California! See, back at the end of the 18th century, Spain was all in a scuttle over Russia’s territories in the northwest, so they sent Padre Serra and Gaspar de Portolá (who keep showing up all over my landmark quest) to lay claim to the land. To do so, they had to push out the local Kumeyaay people, for whom California was not being born but being lost. I should add, though, that the Kumeyaay made stick houses that would make any beaver envious! In any case, from this point in 1769 began the northward trek of the Spanish that would eventually result in fake tans and fast cars in slow traffic. Isn’t history wild?!
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Fast forward nearly a hundred years and just over a hundred yards, and there you’ll find a memorial to Fort Stockton, the proverbial high ground of the Mexican-American War of 1846. Here, forces of the official United States battled the folks from Mexico who had spread up Portolá’s fake tan causeway after Spain was ousted from the west coast. Why a battle? Manifest Destiny was a big part. In case you’re having trouble remembering elementary history, that was the time period when America said “We’re America. We’re awesome. God thinks so too. Let’s claim as much land as we can for God and Country. Awesome!” And they did. I won’t spoil the end of the war for you, but I think you can guess how it ended.
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Jumping past the landmark that’s now a golf course and the landmark that’s now a restaurant, I arrived at one of the most exciting landmarks of all: The Whaley House! The Whaley House has been hailed as one of the most haunted houses in America! It all started with the hanging of Yankee Jim Robinson on this site in 1852. I don’t know why they called him Yankee Jim; maybe the executioners were Red Sox fans. In any case, they hanged him and the industrious Whaley family built their part-house, part-general-store, part-courthouse, part-ballroom, part-commercial-theatre over the hanging grounds. As sure as a beaver can out-chuck ten woodchucks, five years later, those poor Whaleys started to hear heavy footsteps tramping around upstairs! But things only got spookier after that!
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In the house’s front room, there was a stack of photo albums—guest photos of possible ghosts, explained the nice volunteer lady in period attire. She went on to say she’d had her own paranormal experiences in this house. One night as she was closing up the house for the day, a little fox terrier came scampering into the room in order to bark at her. When she told it to be quiet, it vanished into thin air! And as if that weren’t spooky enough, she pointed to a pair of photos taken in the exact theatre where I’m standing in the photo above. Both, she said, were taken by the same person, right after each other. But what I saw were two scenes of very different furniture and signage! Spooky! Do I believe now? Am I convinced? Well, I’d have to come back at night and see. One can never be too careful in the world of Photoshop…
That’s all for now! More adventures in San Diego tomorrow!
Stepping heavily down the hall,
