Helen Redman

La Roque has worked for Gray Line Tours since 1946. He does his job well but without false enthusiasm.

Rain is not good weather in which to take a bus tour of San Diego. The color of the air changes, and the crisp edges fall off trees, billboards, bodies of water. Windshield wipers sound melancholy, even to a tourist. This is a summer morning rain, unusual in this city, but of course, the tourists don't know it. And I’m not going to tell them, because it wouldn’t change their mood one way or the other. Rain is just a kink in the plan to them, a wrinkle easily smoothed by resigning themselves to the capriciousness of weather. They are even comforted by the rain, I think, because it is an unexpected hurdle they can easily clear by rising on their own good cheer. Not everything in life is this easy, which none of us on this bus needs to be reminded of. Especially the people who are supposed to be on vacation.

Richard points out the house of Tribune editor Neil Morgan on Torrey Pines Road.

Helen Redman

I would like to share in this optimism, damp as it is, but the thrill of seeing a new place is impossible right now. My first obstacle is the hour: just past 8:00 a.m. on a Tuesday, an overzealous departure time, in my opinion. Second obstacle: I am touring the city I have lived in for the last eight years. I am here to do a job — find out what the tourists are being told on two San Diego sightseeing trips — and not to have fun.

I should go on Doug's walking tour of the Hotel Del. But frankly, I’m sick of the Del.

Helen Redman

But in place of excitement I get superiority, which is probably better. What feeling surpasses the possession of insider knowledge on a popular subject? It’s so satisfying to leave wrongs uncorrected, contented to know the right answer and keep it to yourself.

“My perception of La Jolla was a quainter, sleepier town,” says a man with a Texas accent. “Hell, it was jam-packed yesterday.” The man is addressing the bus driver, who apologizes for the traffic jam without actually saying he is sorry or admitting responsibility. The former Texan, who now lives in Connecticut, is going to Disneyland with his pre-teen daughter. They discuss yesterday’s activities. “Everyone in the world has a panda T-shirt,” he tells her. He has a question for the bus driver: “There’s a barbecue restaurant on Ash Street. Is it any good?” He also wants to know where he should eat Mexican food. The driver tells him the food at Roberto’s is the same as the food served from Tijuana street stands “except you don’t get Montezuma’s revenge.” The first part of this equation is untrue: there are no bowls of fresh cilantro and free guacamole at Roberto’s, and their tortillas don’t have that thick corn taste I like. Nonetheless, it is good advice for a man visiting from Connecticut.

The people on this bus ask so much of the driver. They are like children lost in a department store, dependent upon the kindness of strangers, and he is happy to reassure them. A middle-aged woman whose face is absently fixed in a fret sits alone. She would be much more at ease with a husband to fuss over, but I don’t know where he is or even if he exists. The concierge at the Hotel del Coronado told her to stand and wait for the bus at the wrong place on Orange Avenue. If she hadn’t walked over to look at the old clock and started chatting with the people standing there, she would never have known it was the correct pickup spot. The driver disparages concierges in general (“Just salespeople” he says) and further soothes the woman by writing down the name of the careless concierge.

This is only the pickup bus, the one that goes to all the hotels and then deposits the passengers at the Gray Line bus yard. We stop at the Cabrillo TraveLodge, the Pickwick, the Westgate, and the Churchill Hotel. Also, the YMCA on Broadway. Everyone will soon switch to another bus headed for a different destination. No one would consider Gray Line Sightseeing Tours “a find” in San Diego; the company operates tours in most cities and has become as generic as the TraveLodges and their sleepy bear cub. But it is reliable transportation to the San Diego Zoo, Sea World, Universal Studios, Disneyland, anywhere a tourist might want to go.

I am taking the city (of San Diego) tour, which winds up in Tijuana. Those who are crossing the border have to learn the U.S. Customs ropes now: state your citizenship and place of birth clearly, with no hesitation. An elderly couple from Indiana may prove to be trouble. She says she lives in Tell City, Indiana. He says he lives in the same city. “If you say, ‘Same city,’ it could hold us up,” warns the bus driver.

We are dumped off in the Gray Line bus yard at Kettner and Date, and the driver assures several passengers that the next bus will take them back to their hotel. It is still raining, and I am trying to remember exactly what I thought when I first saw a palm tree. But the memory is gone, buried in the back seat of a 1968 Oldsmobile Cutlass with all my other migrant possessions. I brought white crocheted doilies out here, thinking they were unavailable on the West Coast. I gave my stereo away in Philadelphia, believing that prosperity would soon bring me a better model. Had I known I would be listening to a clock radio for two years, I would have found room in the trunk. But how could I have predicted, at the age of twenty-two, that San Diego had dishonest mechanics? My savings leaked as quickly as my car’s transmission fluid. When every dollar has to be spent sensibly and the purchase of a new textbook is preceded by a quick course in how pawn shops work, you learn the relative value of luxuries.

My car’s many failures taught me other things about San Diego, too: the freeway is a bad place to break down, but on the whole, one neighborhood is as good as another. There were parts of Philadelphia where, if you had to get out of the car to walk to a phone booth, your life was pretty much over. But in every section of San Diego, I found middle-aged men with tools in their trunks who looked at me and said to their subconscious, “This could be my daughter.” Solid men, men who ate dinner at the same time every night, reliable men like Richard La Roque.

La Roque is sixty-two years old and has worked for Gray Line Tours since 1946. Driving a busload of tourists around San Diego is his job; he does it well but without false enthusiasm. For this I am grateful. Only tourists can stomach a peppy woman with a squeaky voice, the type I have encountered on every single tour bus (four altogether) I’ve taken at the San Diego Zoo. While I’m sure that a female could capably drive this long silver-and-red coach, it’s still a relief to see a rotund man behind the wheel. He looks like a bus driver but sounds like a tour guide. His voice, a cross between the tones of Rod Serling and Jason Robards, is sure of itself. Richard has a pale, round face and a short bristle of gray hair. On his back is the regulation blue short-sleeved shirt; on his head, a white Gray Line cap. Richard was born in San Diego, raised his family here, and left only to fight in World War II. He has that pride of cityhood that few towns can foster in their residents. Never, ever, would you see a bumper sticker that said: “Native Philadelphian.”

Richard has not spent all these years in San Diego without forming some opinions, which he freely shares with his passengers. When we pass the Laurel Travel Center, the new five-story parking structure on the Laurel Street hill, he indicates how it juts into the path of descending airplanes. “You can see that the local FAA office is staffed by a group of kindergarten-class dropout mentalities,” he says. Nor does he like the look of the building, a gray cement block with lavender and blue trim. “I think the people who designed the building have the same (kindergarten-class dropout] mentality,” he adds. Richard is echoing the remarks of every person I have ever ridden with past that parking structure. It is one of the most maligned buildings in San Diego, and now the tourists hate it too.

Maybe we can relapse for a moment into a discussion of the word “tourist” versus the word “visitor” When you’re driving through Hotel Circle on Interstate 8 and a Plymouth Reliant wearing an “Alamo Rent A Car” sticker swerves into your lane (using its turn signal, as though that makes it okay) and then slows down to forty-five miles per hour while the swivel-headed couple driving it decide on where to exit the freeway, you do not yell out “these goddamn visitors!” The word “tourist” carries a cargo of bad connotations, most of them involving their stupidity and our inconvenience. Maybe that’s why San Diego has a Convention and Visitors Bureau, shortened to the even more palatable name of CoriVis.

Approximately ten million “visitors” come through San Diego each year, excluding the people who come just for a day. CoriVis can’t say how many of them are conventioneers because the competitive hotel industry is stingy with its business figures. But conventioneers, or more frequently, the spouses and families of conventioneers, make up a good share of the passengers on tour buses, according to Mark Jobin, operations manager of Gray Line Tours. “We do get a few visiting relatives [of San Diegans], but it’s pretty insignificant,” says Jobin.

This sends a little stab of guilt through me, since I put my mother on one of these tours when she came to visit me that first year. It was called The Bus That Goes in Circles, a now-defunct tour of San Diego. I assumed that everyone else in town sent their relatives on guided tours, but now I suspect they’re either conducting the tours themselves or denying their loved ones the opportunity of seeing the white cross on Mt. Soledad.

But, I’m proud to say, my mother saw it all. She came home buzzing with her discoveries about San Diego, many of them crammed into her purse in the form of a brochure. She visited Sea World by herself, and although she won’t admit this, my mother had a better time alone than when the two of us went there two years later. It was an extremely warm summer day, and all I wanted to do was sit at a shady snack bar table and drink beer. When I refused to watch any more sea mammal shows, she suggested we leave.

Richard La Roque doesn’t mind people like my mother who always sit toward the front of the bus and ask lots of questions. What bugs him, he says, is having to repeat the same information because somebody wasn’t listening the first time he said it. But in forty-one years of tour bus driving (the last two on this particular route), Richard has grown accustomed to even this. “You really have to remember that they can’t absorb everything,” he says. If someone asks for information he doesn’t know — for example, how long it took to build the Coronado Bay Bridge — Richard will look it up (he keeps San Diego fact books on board) during one of the stops where the tourists roam on their own. Or he will make a couple of calls after his shift, in case the question comes up again. So far, the most difficult question he’s been asked is, “What do industrial properties pay in taxes?” He’s fielded this question four times altogether. “I always make a mental note to check with the tax assessor, and at the end of the day I forget,” he says. “Then no one asks me for a while.”

Richard keeps current on local politics, and he continues to mix personal insight with the view from the bus. We are looking at the world according to Richard La Roque, where Proposition 13 was a good thing and green cement is ugly. “Look at what that fellow did,” he later says, as we drive past some houses on Mission Boulevard. “He put green cement in to look like grass. But you can see it’s not grass.” Richard considers Mission Beach to be “sort of a run-down area,” which he blames on absentee landlords. He says that the city’s planning department conducted a survey of the area and found that ninety percent of the rental property owners in Mission Beach don’t live in California.

I don’t know whether to believe this. Richard also told us that the entire city council (save one member) reversed their votes on the Mission Bay Plunge redevelopment and that the “human outcry” against the project caused four council members not to seek re-election this year. “They saw the handwriting on the wall,” intones Richard.

In reality there was no vote reversing, just a last-ditch fight against the project by the mayor. Only Councilman Mike Gotch, who represents the beach area, was mortally damaged by the protests; much of his district turned against him, and he won’t be seeking a third term. Three other incumbents also chose not to run, but their reasons had nothing to do with the plunge.

Richard’s facts and commentaries are good enough for this bus and the people on it, though. Most appear to be the same general age and station in life as Richard, who knows his audience well. Much of his dialogue is based on what people have asked him over the years — namely, real-estate prices. When Richard sees a house for sale on his route, he checks the newspaper or calls the realtor to find out the asking price. He also tells passengers what particular houses sold for and any details —lot size, number of bedrooms, et cetera — he may have discovered. Richard even tells us what he pays, on the average, for his water and utilities — information that the other homeowners want to know but are usually too polite to ask.

We finish with Balboa Park, where I learn that San Diego has the largest outdoor organ in the world, has the largest naval hospital in the country, and is the fifth largest city in the nation by area. Richard can identify any number of trees, another common tourist request. He tells the bus that Yokohama, our Japanese sister city, has promised 125 cherry trees for the new Japanese garden. I’m not about to announce that funding for the Japanese garden was cut out of an upcoming bond issue, making the garden a distant dream. I'm also ashamed to see that the big fountain is still not working. It could be a refreshing site outside the Reuben H. Fleet Space Theatre. This is the second consecutive year that the fountain has been out of operation for most of the summer. When I called last year, the parks department said the motor got flooded and they were waiting on a part. What’s their excuse this year? Maybe I’ll have Richard call about it.

We stop the bus in the middle of the Laurel Street bridge while Richard talks about the Museum of Man, the Old Globe Theatre, and the Cassius Carter playhouse. Cars pile up behind us, but no one beeps his horn, a reserved behavior that still impresses me. On our way to the freeway, we pass Mr. A’s, home of the expensive steak dinner. But the drinks at Mr. A’s are normally priced, and the view from the cocktail lounge is impressive. There is a catch, however, one that my friends and I have been snagged on several times: gentlemen must wear jackets, even in the bar. Which makes Mr. A’s the perfect place to go for a drink once every three years.

Heading north on I-5, Richard talks about droughts, brush fires, and other local disasters. He points out the freeway ice plants, which originally came from South Africa and are eighty percent water. Walking on it, as anyone who has ever ambled down a freeway bank knows, is like treading on Styrofoam peanuts. Without the big yellow flowers or the purple carpet blooms, this ice plant stuff looks pretty dull. My eyes wander to the cars below us, and I realize, once again, that bus windows allow the viewer to look down into people’s cars. How many tourists have seen me hiking up my nylons on the way to work? I remember a bus ride through downtown San Diego one afternoon where the male driver of a two-seater was well aware of what I could see from my window. He drove alongside the bus for a block or two because he wanted to show me something. It was interesting, all right. The only road sight today is a woman applying her mascara in the rear-view mirror while driving sixty miles per hour. She has a Mary Kay sticker in the front window of her Volkswagen van.

Before we get to La Jolla, we drive past Mt. Soledad, where Richard points out the hilltop house of Ted Geisel. Most people know him as Dr. Seuss, but I know him as the party king of San Diego. Mr. and Mrs. Geisel appear in practically every Burl Stiff society column I’ve ever read in the Union. Whether it’s a minor hors d’oeuvre reception or a black-tie fundraiser, the Geisels are there. Richard also points out the house of Tribune editor Neil Morgan on Torrey Pines Road. “The architect calls it modem Moorish Mediterranean,” says Richard, relishing the name. He draws our attention to the front windows of the master bedroom. Does Neil know we’re looking into his bedroom while he’s at work?

Richard later tells me that a man once took his tour because he wanted to find out what the tour guide said when the bus stopped in front of his house. The man, a retired engineer, apparently approved; the two of them had lunch together in Old Town. When we wind through the hills of La Jolla, Richard indicates “a mixture of incomes” by pointing out small houses next to elaborate mansions. He stops in front of a Spanish cottage he particularly likes. Like most of the houses on Olivetas Avenue, this one is built right up to the street, with barely a sidewalk between the bus and the front door. Through the cottage window, I see the glow of a lampshade, with the dim outline of a man standing next to it. He waves.

San Diegans appeared as a friendly people to me when I first came here, and by and large, they still do. Strangers aren’t afraid to look you in the eyes or make an off-handed observation. While I found this enchanting, it proved to be no solace during bouts of the inevitable stranger-in-town blues. I am reminded of a few despondent nights as we pass the London’s West End bar, where La Jolla Boulevard turns into Mission Boulevard. Seven years ago, it was called Quinn’s Pub, a usually empty bar owned by a gentleman whose name I forget but whose face stays distinct. He looked like a Pat. He was kind and attentive and kept obnoxious men at bay — everything a woman alone in a bar needs. He was also married, a fact he skipped over in his life story. But these situations have a way of revealing themselves (someone in the bar asked for the wife, I think). The news came as a mild surprise but certainly not a debilitating shock: I did not drop into San Diego from a passing turnip truck. Regardless of his motivation, Pat (or maybe it was Jim) sent me home satiated with the milk of human benevolence, and I fell asleep a little more hopeful on those nights. Plus, he rarely charged me for drinks.

Dislocation is a state of being that tourists pay good money for. Spending time away from home is refreshing for them because it provides a chance to re-examine the familiar, perhaps see a way of fine-tuning existence into something better. Whether they do it aloud or in a voice silent to their own minds, tourists continually compare the place they’re visiting to the place they live. In most cases, I think San Diego looks a lot better. The apparent improvement bites into some people’s souls, resulting in one more person moving to San Diego and four more relatives coming out for occasional visits. Or, in my case, eight more relatives.

Richard caters to his passengers’ needs with an anticipation cultivated by years of experience. He knows what they want before they do. At Cabrillo National Monument, as with most of the stops, he points out the locations of the bathrooms and food before we discharge from the bus. It has stopped raining, but the sky remains a blotchy gray. I pass our twenty-minute stop by identifying navy ships with a legend map next to one of the horizon outlooks.

Few sights are more arresting than an aircraft carrier, except maybe a Boeing 727 as it suddenly fills your windshield when you’re driving along Interstate 5. San Diego has both, but the tour bus encounters neither today. The only ships I see are two destroyers, which could well be frigates or cruisers, since nothing in the ocean resembles the pictures in front of me. Is this a World War II diagram? The little girl next to me is just as confused. “Mommy, what ocean is this?” she asks her mother. No answer. The child repeats the question. “California’s ocean,” says her mother.

Like most San Diegans, I like going to Old Town as much as I like getting stuck in an elevator. Every time I’m there, I find myself driving through the same public parking lots looking for the same nonexistent parking places. Richard names half the restaurants in Old Town as we pull in. Everyone has forty-five minutes to shop or eat or gawk and then it’s time to leave for the embarcadero. If we happen to go into O'Hungry’s for lunch (Richard does) and we want the salad bar, just go right up there and help yourself. The waitress will come by soon and get your drinks. Richard is being very helpful on this score, but he does not want anyone to come back late to the bus. This is the most difficult thing to deal with in his job, he says. What does he do in these instances? Radio his dispatcher, who generally tells him to leave them behind, Richard says.

While we wait for the last stragglers, a small problem develops in the seat in front of me. The elderly couple from Tell City (named after William Tell) has a Pepsi can to dispose of. There are no visible trash cans on the bus. They discuss their options: get off the bus and quickly find a trash can (too risky), set it on the floor (too ill-mannered), put it in the woman’s purse (too sticky), or just hold onto it. This is a small dilemma, but one of many that tourists confront. Decisions (When should we cash the fifty-dollar travelers check? Where should we eat dinner tonight?) must be continually made. Questions (Did we get a good deal? What didn’t we see?) nag the tourist subconscious.

As we pull out of Old Town, I hear Richard checking in with his dispatcher. “We’re two short,’’ he says. “Gotta get going.” The bus has to make it to the San Diego Harbor Excursion, which is included in the price of the all-day tour. Richard’s boss described him to me as “temperamental,” but in this case I think it means “does his job without taking any bullshit from anybody.” Richard will bend over backwards for his passengers — once he got reprimanded by U.S. Customs agents for illegally parking his bus to help one of his bargain-crazed charges. The shopper was so astounded by the price of wooden picture frames in Tijuana that he bought forty of them and then had to carry the lot across the border himself. Richard was trying to move the bus closer to save the guy some sweat.

Seconds after Richard sees his last passenger onto the 12:45 harbor cruise, the boat pulls away. He gets back on the bus to take the remaining people, who only signed up for the half-day tour, back to their individual hotels. Then he returns to the Broadway pier to wait for his all-day passengers on the one-hour boat ride. From there they go to Tijuana for two hours of shopping. Richard will probably pass the time at the Caesar Hotel, where he likes to have a bite, wait for the San Diego Tribune at the hotel newsstand, and read the paper in the lobby.

I ditch the tour at this point. Viewing San Diego through a bus window filled my head with new facts about the city, information I’ve either overlooked or had no inroads to. But at the same time, the tour robbed me of the town’s spirit, made me a participant in a shallow perusal that told everything but said nothing. All any of us can really know is our own experience; maybe this is the only valid perception. To try for more is futile at best, pretentious at least, and probably an insult to the subject being studied. The last thing I want to do right now is see Tijuana from a sightseeing bus.

Docked next to the harbor cruiser is the Coronado ferry, which will take me home. It is full of tourists. One man holds his young son against the edge of the boat and points into the bay. “Look! Shamu!” he says. Fifteen minutes later, we approach the Old Ferry Landing, yet another spawning of retail shops and eateries. This one is designed to look like the Hotel del Coronado from the roof up. Rumor has it (on the op-ed page of the local paper) that the quickest way past the city’s architectural review panel is to use the Del design. This tactic is not lost on a group of three women, dressed to their very molars, who are taking the ferry to Coronado for a look-see. They are enjoying the ride, although they can think of numerous ways of improving upon it: a cocktail lounge, dancing, a Dixieland band. Right before we dock, one of the women points to a large building that will soon open as a Chart House restaurant. “Oh, look, the Hotel Del!” she says. And, “I thought it was bigger than that.”

The sight of the unfinished Chart House steams my blood. We already have a Chart House restaurant in Coronado, and it caters mostly to the tourists because they are the only ones willing to spend fifteen dollars on a piece of broiled fish. (Baked potatoes are extra.) Ask the average Coronadan what this town needs and he or she will probably say, “A few good, affordable restaurants.” Coronado is the kind of place that has one of everything, and when you don’t like the food at the local Italian restaurant (I think Marco’s uses MSG in the tomato sauce), the dining-out options are narrowed.

Waiting at the end of the ferry dock is the trolley, which almost everyone on the boat boards. Their destination: the lobby of the Hotel del Coronado. My destination: the refrigerator at my house. I get up when we approach the Mobil station (the station with three full-serve pumps and two self-serve pumps) and stand in the doorway, refusing to pull the oak handle that goes “ling ling” when we get to my street.

After a week’s rest. I am ready to tackle Gray Line’s main competitor: San Diego Mini Tours. Both companies run three city tours a day. visit the same places (with a few exceptions), and are priced within five bucks of each other. (Gray Line is cheaper right now.) They also run shopping trips to Tijuana. The passengers are dropped off on the U.S. side of the border, they walk across and shop for two or three hours, and then they come back to the waiting bus (San Diego Mini Tours used to include dinner in a Tijuana restaurant as part of the trip, but the patrons complained about the food.) Both companies offer a combo trip that takes passengers to the San Diego Zoo in the morning and .then Sea World in the afternoon.

The big difference between the two companies is the buses themselves. San Diego Mini Tours has a fleet of vehicles that resemble the big shuttle vans used by hotels to pick up airport passengers. The seats are bucket-type, well-padded, contoured. Tall, clean windows form the van’s walls and provide an eye-level view of the city — an improvement over the heights of the bus windows. But it lacks the chilled metal atmosphere of the bus, which some people find uncomfortable but I happen to like. The temperature in the van is tightly controlled by a hissing airstream in the back that all but drowns out conversations A preferable situation all around, until the climate apparatus is turned off and we almost become baked tourist souffle. But that doesn’t happen until Old Town.

Our driver. Doug Bass, is tall, slender, bald, and has a Buddha smile. His gentle voice rarely modulates over the next four hours. It’s two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, and San Diego has come through with a sunny, clear, bright day. As we wait for passengers at one of the hotels, Doug suggests that we greet our neighbors and find out where everyone else is from. The idea does not go over big, but glances and smiles are exchanged. Everyone sits in pairs, except for a young Indian girl and an older woman who both sit alone.

Our driver had hoped to blot out the blank moments that can be quite disturbing to tourists. People are accustomed to boredom in their own homes or in their workplaces, but not while they are vacationing. Boredom at home is a free waste of time; on vacation, you’re losing money. Bass fills the void by pointing out a bougainvillea plant growing on a chain-link fence and the ice plant along the freeway. Ice plant is also called “pickle grass,” he says; it’s ninety percent water. (Richard said it was eighty percent. Whom am I to believe?)

After making the hotel rounds, Doug wheels us past Mission Bay to La Jolla. He talks about the various water sports that I never partake in because they involve getting wet. Also, there are the sewage spills. That water may look clean and sparkling, but.... On the way up Torrey Pines Road, just past La Jolla Shores Drive, our driver tells us to look on the right hand side for the “Petite Taj Mahal.” It was built by the grandson of Queen Victoria, who wanted it to be an architecture school, he says. The house was later bought by Phyllis Diller. We arch our necks as we pass the building but can only see a part of a white dome through the pine trees.

Doug is big on history, so we learn a lot of it. The La Jolla caves (in front of the shell shop) were once used by pirates to store their booty and by bootleggers to store their booze. The water in the cove is exceptionally deep, which explains the location of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. We park next to the cove so couples can get out and take a picture of it and then take a picture of each other in front of it. and then ask someone to photograph the two of them together I make a long-overdue admission to myself: after looking at La Jolla Cove forty or fifty times, it has lost some of its dazzle. While I still feel compelled to pull over and watch the sun set when I’m driving along the coast, usually I just keep going.

Twisting along the cove, we pass the Green Dragon Colony, two ramshackle red buildings shrouded by weeds. Doug tells us it was an artists’ colony in the Twenties, and he hears they’re going to renovate the buildings into a museum. (Richard told his bus that the owner of the buildings wants to tear them down but the Coastal Commission would like him to convert them into apartments, and now they’re at a stalemate, and the result is two rotting eyesores with “No Trespassing” signs on them. I remember reading in the newspaper that the owner, a local architect wanted to build a hotel, but the La Jolla activists opposed it and he gave up. The truth is somewhere between the three of us, I think.)

We leave La Jolla on Hillside Drive, a narrow, winding street that leads to Mt. Soledad. The view is stupendous, and once again we marvel at the way rich people live, most of us a bit envious. I went to a La Jolla party this past spring, at the home of a friend of an acquaintance. It was a barbecue, actually, a poolside affair. We were told to bring our swimsuits.

Given a choice, I will always opt for as much clothing as is reasonably possible when meeting people for the first time. This certainly rules out naked hot-tubbing, an availability I have apologetically turned down (why was I the embarrassed one?) at several San Diego gatherings. The mores I best learned from my parents came through osmosis, an unspoken transfer of decency from one generation to the next: Don’t pick up candy from the sidewalk and eat it, don't maim small animals, and never take your clothes off in front of strangers.

The hostess was tall, blond, pretty, sculptured. Her young husband didn’t look much like a doctor, but I think this was because of his bathing trunks. Their house was brand new, a sprawling Spanish hacienda they had designed themselves. The party occasion was someone’s birthday, but the person was clearly upstaged by the house.

It certainly deserved all the praise we heaped on it when moments dragged their feet through conversations. But something about the house made me ill at ease, as though it were on a restless earthquake fault. The subtle disturbance soon unveiled itself: I was an interloper. I did not belong on this furniture. The magazines on the coffee table were not the ones I read. Outside, the street was motionless except for a lawn sprinkler or two. A few steps from the house, I stumbled upon a set of stone steps that resembled a European alley passage. Several flights down, the stairs ended at a small ocean cove. I marveled at the beauty of it all and realized that rich people are either born or molded. To aspire to a oceanfront house in La Jolla means changing into someone else, which might be a bonus for some people, but I’d rather not take the chance.

On to Mt. Soledad, one of the few tourist attractions in San Diego without bathrooms. It is very windy. Some of us feel obligated to get off the bus, but others shuck the facade of curiosity and stay in their seats. After this comes Presidio Park, where Doug Bass really shines as a guide. A member of the San Diego Historical Society, Doug narrates the early days of San Diego and its first settlement at the Presidio. It’s hard to imagine enslaved Indians while looking at a modem couple on a grassy slope who are testing the legal limits of publicly displayed affection. In the comer of the park, a bride and groom hold hands, a minister standing in front of them and their family and friends sitting behind them. Next to them is our tour bus, which slows down to a crawl as we all peer out the window.

At Old Town we get twenty minutes to shop or gulp down some food. The bus is parked adjacent to Squibob Square, where a soporific marimba band plays a listless version of “La Bamba.” I mill about the square, learning an important operative for a tourist-infested area: never step back quickly. Inevitably, you will tread on someone, as tourists have a tendency to stand and stare, especially in groups. I also notice that many of the Squibob Square visitors have a rather blank look on their faces and walk with a certain shuffle.

Two blocks away from Squibob Square, where a dirt road dead ends at a set of public rest rooms, is a tree I was not kissed in front of last summer. It was our second date, and we were acting like two colleagues who coincidentally wanted to see the same awful play at the Old Town Opera House. The streets were quiet and empty by the time we took our stroll. After visiting the bathrooms, we reconvened at a huge eucalyptus tree and searched for new topics of conversation, both of us aware of the romantic opportunity, both of us afraid to make the first move. After a half-hour, we exhausted the discursive possibilities and left.

The kiss did happen later that night (on my initiative) before I got into my car on Kalmia Street in Golden Hill. As soon as we made contact, I noticed a drug deal going on across the street, which I felt compelled to comment on. It spoiled the moment. The next date we got good and drunk in Nunu’s bar on Fifth Avenue, and things progressed nicely from there.

By the time we get back on the bus, the marimba band has lapsed into “Strangers in the Night.” A woman from Alabama was impressed with Old Town, which she had not heard of before she came to San Diego. “This really should be promoted more than it is,” she calls out to our driver. “We make such a big deal about Williamsburg and St. Augustine, but they don’t have as much as this.” We wait for a stray tourist, the big lady who came alone.

And wait, and wait. The driver can’t turn on the air conditioning (the Squibobs complain if he idles the engine), and the bus windows are for looking only. Doug goes on short scouting missions (Richard would have been out of here by now), and finally she shows up, twenty minutes late, without apologies. Go back to Topeka or Toronto or wherever it is they tolerate that behavior, I want to tell her, but I just glare through the window like the other passengers.

The tour is about to take a much-needed upswing. After we tool around the Gaslamp district, there is a complimentary glass of champagne and a piece of pastry waiting for us at Bonaparte’s Retreat on Fifth Avenue. The bus turns up an alley and unloads us next to a sidewalk patio guarded by a short iron fence. The tardy woman sits at the table of the little Indian girl, who has done a lot of silent staring out the window during the trip. Our driver Doug makes the chit-chat rounds.

Doug Bass, age forty-two, has been leading these tours for five months. He has left the hurly-burly Los Angeles life, where he worked for Columbia Pictures in the sales and promotion department. Doug admits that ours is not a very responsive group, and although he is too dignified to say this, they don’t appear to be big tippers, either. On a good day, he can make more than $150 in tips. On a bad day, it’s not much more than his five-dollar-an-hour salary. But there are other perks, according to Doug. His eyes start beaming when he talks about the Chinese panda delegation, which he drove around Los Angeles and San Diego for two weeks. “I learned where the best Chinese restaurants in town are,” he says. His recommendations? Hsu’s on Clairemont Mesa Boulevard, and Gen Lai Sen, across from City College, at the intersection of Twelfth and C.

Almost everyone drank his champagne, I notice as we leave the patio. The atmosphere inside the bus is suddenly cheery; voices are louder, some making it above the hiss of the air conditioning. Across the aisle from me are two men, one very old and the other almost old. They look and act like father and son. They have not said one word to each other the entire trip. The son finally speaks during the driver’s praise of Tijuana restaurants. ‘‘Yeah, sure,” he says to his father, who continues staring out the window.

I should go on Doug's walking tour of the Hotel Del, the last stop on this trip. I have never been able to find my way around in there, and maybe a tour would orient me better. But frankly, I’m sick of the Del. I have to escort every relative who comes into town through the lower-level gift shops and look at the Some Like It Hot photographs for the hundredth time. Parking around there is a real pain. I might come back here on Saturday, as the big dining room serves the most pleasant breakfast around for miles. (On Sundays, it hosts a harried, hungry brunch mob.) Or maybe I’ll have a drink on the ocean deck after work on Monday, when hardly anyone is there. Watching sunsets is not something we San Diegans can do every night of the week, but every once in a while, it’s nice.