There’s a sad story behind the creation of the San Diego Zoo .. but I guess it proves that every cloud has a silver lining. Back in 1915, San Diego played host to the Panama California Exposition – to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal, and San Diego’s location as the first major (American) port-of-call…
If you do an internet search for Little Italy, you’ll probably find the first reference is to an area of your home town where that nickname’s been assigned. In my case, it’s New Farm in Brisbane – but if you were in Melbourne, it would be Lygon Street. In New York, of course, there’s a…
At first glance, San Diego may not seem like a natural home for a Air and Space museum – Complete with an actual Apollo command module (Apollo IX – “Gumdrop”).. but the city does have a tradition of aviation: after all, its airport was originally known as Lindbergh Field, and the aviation pioneer tested his famous…
Defence (or Defense, as it is spelled there) has played an important role in San Diego .. it is host to the largest naval fleet in the world, and the only major Sub- and Ship-building facilities on the West Coast of the US. In fact, there are more than 35,000 defence personnel and contractors in…
San Diego, a city in Southern California near the border with Mexico, is a city of 1.4 million people – and is a world center for military and defence industries, biotech and more recently, healthcare. But in a lot of ways, it is its co-location with Tijuana across the border that has fuelled San Diego’s…
In most places in America, this picture would evoke fear – or at least it would evoke memories of September 11. But in San Diego, it’s virtually unnoticed – happening, as it does, around 500 times every day. San Diego is the busiest single runway airport in America, and it’s flight path is intriguing – coming in,…
Three men, Three days. 380,000km each way. All in a tin can this small. The Apollo moon shots of the late 60s and early 70s were an amazing time – and an amazing technological feat. But now they are gone, leaving little for nerds like me except memories. And the occasional museum exhibition, like the…
It’s a funny thing – I grew up just a km away from Maroubra Beach in Sydney – and when I was a kid, the suburb was nowhere near as filled-in as it is today. There were sand dunes everywhere when I was a pre-teen, and it seemed to me that they were endless. Of…
Continuing our On The Road Again series – for Thursday, we are in Berkeley, California. And a store that has been a Berkeley institution, one way or another, since the 1930s. There are are former S.H. Kress stores all across America – and most of the “Five and Dime” stores are showpieces of the architecture…
We’re on the road again – this time, a rail-and-road trip around the western states of the US. We’ve started in San Francisco – and last night, we went to our first baseball game with our daughter Lini, and son in law Joe. Whenever I thought of San Francisco and baseball (which is not, I have…
