Day 8 - Goodbye Friends, Hello Ghosts...

Now I realize this post's title sounds morbid, but bear with me.  My friends didn't die.  They are not ghosts.  And I am not being haunted (by them, anyway...Timmy is another story, as the other night in our apartment can attest to--but that's a whole other ball of ectoplasm...).

No, no.  This was the day that Robb and I would say goodbye to Amy and Erin, as they both had to get home for various family things.  Robb and I still had four more blissful days to spend in San Diego.  But, since they were leaving, I really just putzed around the hotel room for the morning.  After they left, though, I went to see Robb at the conference, since I had nothing better to do.

Upon getting in the elevator, I saw that the Carnival cruise ship had docked.  So, up the the 14th floor to take photos from the glass elevator! 



It was HUGE, like a floating city!  We later found out that when it had docked, a man was led out by police for killing his wife (blunt trauma to the head) and stowing her body in his room (why he didn't throw her overboard is a mystery, as is why he killed her at all)!  So close to drama!  It was a little scary, after the fact.

Anywho, I decided to give the Gaslamp District another shot on my way to the conference center.  I took the train to the convention center and walked back to see about going in stores and finding lunch.  I still found it lackluster, though.  This made me chuckle:



Not a strip club.  A steak house.

And this was worth the trip:



The intersection, I mean...yeah...OBVIOUSLY what I was taking ap hoto of when this gorgeous young stud got in the way...what a shame.

I was all sightseeing and hot weather for hours, since he didn't get out until four.  So, I saw:



And I sat for an hour and texted some friends from this park:



That's the same park as theo ne the dog was swimming in the other day.  So pretty!

Throughout the trip we had been giving our leftovers from eating out to random homeless people, since they needed it more than we did and we had no fridge.  I was fairly comfortable, having met most of them near our hotel.  But in this park I started to feel like the homeless guys were getting a little too interested in why I was just hanging around there, so I headed over to the convention center to people watch.  What a great idea!



The hottie rickshaw drivers were just hanging out under the trees, so I did, too.  And there I stayed for several hours, just watching people go by and loving that I had the freedom to sit under a tree and enjoy the wonderful breeze.

And when I sit in the same place for too long, I feel the need to take random pictures like this one:



Cute little mushroom.  Anyone know what kind it is?  I'm assuming it wasn't edible.

Once Robb came out of the conference we took a stroll to a fishing pier.



We took the train back to our hotel and packed our stuff up before heading towards the Whaley House again.  We were going to have to switch hotels on Friday, the next day, so we wanted to be prepared. 

And I realize now that the rest of this post (like the first half) is going to be really lame without Robb's photos to post...but he doesn't have them on his computer yet.  I'll have to get back to you about the haunted craziness at the Whaley House.  Apparently my boyfriend attracts ghosts (if you believe that a very noticeable orb in a photo is evidence of a ghost). 

Until I can share his photos, all I have from that night is another one of those blue dots with the glow around it from the back of the house:



Still creepy.  And the ladies in the shop said they didn't know what it was, and that it could very well be a ghost.

I apologize for the delay, but I'll be sure to share his photos with you, as he took hundreds, tens of which have odd stuff in them!

So...three days left in San Diego, including visiting my Uncle Howard, who I found out has been reading my blog for years (hi Howard!), and San Diego Pride, as well as my unspeakably horrible trip to L.A.

Woo-hoo!

Out

Day 6 - Haunted...

This was the view from my bed.  Seriously...you can imagine how hard it was to get out of it every morning.  But had I not pried myself from its torturous beauty, I'd never have seen a ghost!  Sort of.

Today Amy, Erin, and I went to Old Town.  I thought I was going to kind of hate it, but it turns out that it was probably my favorite place in the whole city.  We hopped on the super clean, super nice public train that stopped just outside of Old Town...



And then we arrived!



Finally, a cactus!  We consulted an Asian lady about where to eat, and she tried to sell us a fairly expensive trolley tour of everything we'd seen all vacation by telling us there was nothing cheap to eat in the area and that there was a Pizza Hut and Subway in Seaport Village (which, having been there the two days before, I could tell you there was not) and that we could take the trolley tour there and jump off.  So we fended for ourselves.  And we ended up here:



*shudder*  Clowns!  But the food was cheap, and the fish tacos were to die for!  After our bellies were full of amazing guac and two dollar fish tacos, we hit up some shops before ending up here:



This is the Whaley House, the most haunted house in all of America.

Comprised of several rooms and more history than I can share, it was a fascinating tour that yielded little (but not nothing!) in the way of photographic evidence of ghosts this day (but not later!); you'd do well to visit the link I provided and read about it.  It really is worth checking out for a good shiver.  Although I didn't see anything, there were several places in the house where I felt genuinely uneasy, watched, nervous, and altogether uncomfortable.  It was cool!

Virtual tour, anyone?



This is the courtroom, where a female ghost of unknown origin is said to appear from time to time.



This is the staircase (duh), whee it is said that on the 9th step from the bottom people sometimes feel a tightness around their throat and a few even get redness around their wrists and neck that looks like rope burn (supposedly due to Yankee Jim's hanging at that height).  I felt a little tight around the throat when I stood there, but it could have been just because I felt nervous standing there.



This is the bedroom you'll see if you do a Google image search on the house.  There are tons of photos taken of weird fogs and such by the bed...and they said sometimes the dolls change their facial expressions or blink, which I think is the scariest thing EVER!  The only thing I got was that odd line on the headboard...which may or may not be a reflection on the glass I took the photo through, although I can't figure out what it would be a reflection of, and the girls who give tours said they thought it was genuinely something...All I know for sure is those dolls gave me the willies.



This is the theatre.  Yes, they had a theatre.  The manager died about two weeks after the first play they put on, and no one knows why.  He is said to haunt that room, and most people who work there have said they have experienced him in one form or another.  He apparently likes to try to watch the girls change into costume, and so they hear footsteps on the stage when they change.  Once, he followed a worker home from there the one day a week she worked until they confronted him about it.  Eek!



This is the dining room, where I felt the most uneasy.  Even before I was inside it, I just felt not quite right about it.  They say Mrs. Whaley haunts this room most frequently, and her lavender perfume can be quite overwhelming at times.  I know I wanted to get out of there as soon as I could.



And this is the arched doorway where they say Yankee Jim was hanged before the house was built.  The dog apparently haunts this area, along with Mr. Whaley and a number of unidentified spirits.  It didn't seem super creepy to me, but other people really didn't want to look in there. 

Altogether, it was a pretty creepy experience, but nothing compared to when Robb and I went back a few days later.  But that's another story...

From there it was on to the graveyard where the theatre manager was buried.



There were coins along the street embedded in the pavement where they found out people were buried after they built the roads.



That was kind of neat.  The most interesting thing about the graveyard was this grave:



It says:
"Sacred to the memory of
John Stiles
who came to his death
from a bullet
from a revolver
it was one of the old fashioned
kind & brass mounted
& such is the kingdom of heaven"

I just thought it was really hilarious the way the grave marker said more about what killed him than it did about him.  Amazing!  It really was a fascinating graveyard.

Next was the Sheriff's Museum, which was interesting, if you're into that kind of thing.  I'm really not...



But...it made for some odd photos.  I took some time to take a few shots of the hillside, too.



After being under the sun and the beautiful, blue, San Diego sky all day,



we thought a soda would be a good way to cool off.  This tiny little soda shop had everything you could ever want!  They even had Bubble Up, a soda I used to get almost twenty years ago from the vending machine at my mom's work, and the cans were 30 years old THEN!



It's like 7-Up, but fruitier.

And then there was this:



Leninade.  Amazing.

We drank our sodas and took a walk to the shops, stopping for a tortilla from this wonderful woman:



Hot chocolate tortillas.  Delicious!

Robb met up with us when he was done with his conference, and we shopped for a bit, not buying this (which I still kind of regret):



or these (which I don't regret AT ALL):



or this........?



Okay then.  Under the setting California sun, which I've decided one can't take a bad photo of...



...we decided to get some fine Mexican cuisine.

I had a burrito that was filled with carne asada, guacamole, and french fries.  No lie.  It was pretty good!

And despite the girls' best effort to stop him, Robb flagged these guys over to play for us:



And then he requested La Bamba.  *shakes head*  Oh, Robb...

During our meal, we told Robb all about the Whaley house, so he wanted to go back.  We walked by and took some more photos, but the house was closed, so we decided to come back later.  It was only when looking at our photos back at the hotel room later that we noticed this:



This was taken outside the house, in the garden that's said to be haunted by Mrs. Whaley as well as many other spirits.  Erin had three of these blue dots with a mist around them on her camera and a few photos of the same part of the yard where there was nothing there taken only minutes later.  There was no one in the yard at the time these were taken.  And then when I looked at my photros, I had this one, too!  Creepy!

So, our ghost hunting tour may have been successful after all.  I had no idea how successful it would be for Robb when we came back, though...

But that's a story for another day.

Out