I had taken eight or nine guided tours of San Diego in two weeks when a friend asked if I was tired of sightseeing. I had to say no. Being out on buses and boats and trolleys with tourists, I felt like a tourist too. On my mission to see San Diego as tourists see it, I was reminded of how pretty the pretty parts of the city are. And I never got bored because although most tours cover the same ground, guides tell the tourists different — sometimes contradictory — stories.

Big Buses

No one was more hilarious than George (not his real name), the driver/guide on the $29 Contactours city tour. George's audience that morning included African Americans, white Americans, Hispanics, a Chinese couple from Australia, and a sprinkling of Europeans. We filled about three-quarters of the 47-seat bus. It had huge tinted windows but lacked seatbelts or buttons for reclining. There were upper baggage compartments and overhead consoles for directing airflow and turning on reading lights. A bathroom had been built into the far rear of the vehicle, though George warned us, "It has standing water only, guys. Standing water only! That means it doesn't flush."

As George drove the bus south on Harbor Drive downtown, approaching the convention center, he pointed out condominiums across the street whose value "from the 13th floor up" was $15 million (or so he claimed, but a property agent said that was "ridiculous"; they average $1 to $1.5 million). "That's where the movers and shakers live," he said. The convention center, he continued, "was built with a nautical theme in mind." When he challenged us to guess what its curving glass windows might represent, one passenger ventured, "Waves," prompting George to cry out, "You're absolutely right. Tidal waves, guys. It represents tidal waves."

Soon we were passing through "what they call the barrio. The Barrio Logan. This is where a large concentration of the Hispanic culture resides. Now, incidentally, the Hispanic culture in San Diego accounts for about 32 percent of our total population of 1.2 million people," George informed us (he was close: 27 percent and 1.3 million, per SANDAG). He praised the beauty of Chicano Park's murals, "painted by amateur artists that live right here in this neighborhood." (Some murals were, though others were painted by professional artists from outside San Diego.) But we didn't tarry. We were heading for Coronado.

Coronado, George announced, is "the crown city," a term he deemed appropriate "because the prices here are fit for royals. Oh yeah! They're fit for royals, you guys. See, this is a sought-after area to live... If you want to live here, you must first submit your name to the homeowners' association [there's no such thing]. Then you can put a number in, and anytime a property becomes available, they hold a lottery. If you're lucky enough, they'll pull your name, and you can bid on the property. The property always starts at $1.5 million [another exaggeration]. One point five mil! And then when you buy your house, you don't get to live in it. You tear it down! Then you build something else!" All around me, people shook their heads and looked flabbergasted.

Out the left-hand side of the bus he directed our attention to the cottage at 1116 Third Street. The previous month it had sold for a bargain price, $1.2 million, according to George ($645,000, according to a realtor). But it "was the former summer cottage for a woman who made a movie here called Some Like It Hot. Her name was Marilyn Monroe. Yes!" ("No, it's absolutely not true," said the deputy director of the Coronado Historical Association.)

Despite the stratospheric prices, Coronadans had "a real laid-back attitude," George said. "You'll notice nobody's in a hurry." We passed a café on Orange Avenue. "You'll also notice that they sit outside to have their breakfast and lattes and read the paper. But with that comes a very strange mindset. It really does." George told us to notice the towering Norfolk Island pine tree surrounded by a little circle of grass just south of Tenth Street between Isabella and Orange. He announced that it was "the smallest state park in all of California." People guffawed at this, but George again gave no hint that he was making it up (he was). As further testimony to the attitudes of Coronado's residents, he mentioned a requirement that all building plans be submitted to the homeowners' association. "They will look your plans over and make sure your home does not resemble anybody else's. They have everybody else's plans on file, and if anything looks the same, they make you change it.

"This is hard to believe, isn't it?" he sympathized. But he offered more proof of the Coronadans' eccentricity. "All these plants are here because of something known as the plant police. They have a plant police!" he insisted. "You see, there are volunteers that are issued police cars by the Coronado Police Department. One of their functions is to drive the city of Coronado and look for structures that don't have plants outside. Yeah! If you don't have plants outside, you're gonna get a knock on your door, and there will be someone there to write you a ticket. It's a $50 fine, all right? It's a $50 fine to not have plants outside!" You could contest this in court, he added, but "they'll give you community service. And anybody want to guess what the community service is gonna be? Planting flowers! That's right. That's right."

George let the group disembark for a 15-minute bathroom and picture-taking break at the Hotel Del ("one of the last large all-wood structures that's still in operation"). Then he hustled us back onto the bus; we had a lot of ground to cover. On the way to the Gaslamp Quarter, he peppered us with more spicy tidbits, including the "fact" that "the serum for polio" was discovered here in San Diego. "Sure enough. In La Jolla!" (Although Jonas Salk established the Salk Institute here in the early '60s, he developed his polio vaccine in Pittsburgh in the '50s.) Entering lower Fifth Avenue, George assured us of the Gaslamp Quarter's extreme safety, then added that it "was actually started back in 1900 by a gentleman named Alonzo Horton." (Horton purchased his 800 acres downtown in 1867.)

George's sketch of Wyatt Earp's history in the Gaslamp was a classic example of tall-tale storytelling, including such highlights as the fact that Earp's common-law wife was known as "Big Nose Kate" for her propensity to meddle in other people's business (Big Nose Kate was not Earp's wife and was never in San Diego); that she was a prostitute who became the madam for a bordello Earp ran above a saloon, gambling hall, and oyster bar ("Do you people realize that oysters were the poor man's Viagra? Oh yeah! Oh yeah!"); that Earp himself had assumed the job of having sex with all his prostitutes to check their "quality"; and that Kate and another woman one day had a jealousy-inspired "knock-down, drag-out, rolling-around catfight" out in the middle of Fifth Avenue but then turned and together "whupped the living tar out of Wyatt Earp, right in front of everybody."

From downtown, we drove to Balboa Park, where George stopped the bus for a moment in front of the San Diego Museum of Art. He explained that the park's Spanish-style structures, built for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition, were all "supposed to be torn down by 1917. But San Diegans loved these buildings so much that we demanded they remain standing." However, the buildings had been assembled using "baling wire and chewing gum, so in the '60s, they were falling apart." But then an earthquake had saved all the buildings. "Yeah, you heard me right!" George declared. "An earthquake!" That 7.1-magnitude temblor had struck at 5:04 p.m. on October 17, 1989, he said, and though "it only lasted 15 seconds, guys, it almost leveled San Francisco! Well, when that happened, our governor and mayor mandated that all of our public buildings had to be able to withstand an earthquake of 7.1. So all these buildings had to be photographed. Taken down to the ground and rebuilt with steel I-beams." "Really!" someone on the bus exclaimed, impressed. (In fact, most of the 1915 Exposition buildings were temporary, and most were torn down after the exposition; of those left standing, some have been rebuilt in recent decades but not in response to the 1989 earthquake. The Museum of Art was built in 1927.)

Passing the House of Pacific Relations International Cottages, George claimed, preposterously, that they had been used in the filming of the old television show Zorro. "Remember when Zorro was being chased by the soldiers and Sergeant Garcia? He'd be jumping from rooftop to rooftop. This was where it was done, gang. Right here! Now you can see how he was able to jump from rooftop to rooftop!"

Not all of George's outlandish statements were historical or cultural. When we headed for the freeway again, he directed our attention to some unkempt Washingtonia palms and told us there was a reason for their shaggy appearance. "They're more affectionately known as Samson palms," he said; like the biblical Samson, they suffered from any attempt to shear them. "If you cut those dead limbs away from the trunk of the tree, you know what happens? The tree weakens and dies, 'cause it loses all of its insulation." He mangled facts about geography ("Do you know that Interstate 5 is the longest freeway in the United States?") as well as local industry. When our bus passed a car carrier loaded with new Volkswagens, he announced, "All these cars are assembled in Tijuana. They put 'em on trucks like this and bring them back over...and some of them go into the yard, where they're put on big ships and shipped out to the rest of the country." (Actually, VWs are built in Puebla, southeast of Mexico City, and shipped from the Port of Veracruz to the Port of Brunswick, Georgia.)

Our next-to-last stop was La Jolla, "the living and playing area for sports figures, movie stars, playwrights, and entrepreneurs," according to George. Although we might think those structures up on Mt. Soledad were small hotels and motels, they were "actually single-family residences!" A small one-bedroom cottage built during the 1940s might run us about $995,000, he warned. "But count yourself lucky, because you could pay as much as $46 million for a home here." People were sucking in their breaths at that news, but George dropped a bigger bombshell when we motored past La Jolla Cove. "If you would like to get yourself a little bit of investment property while you're here quick, let me show you a couple of fixer-uppers right here on our left." He was indicating the historic Red Roost and Red Rest cottages, long deteriorated because of disagreements over their renovation. But in George's version, they were "on the market right now. They're running for 1.8 mil each." The petite Chinese Australian woman behind me blurted out, "No way!"

Dining in La Jolla made more sense than investing in its property, George advised. Especially on Prospect Street, we couldn't go wrong. "Wherever you decide you want to eat, it will be a fine, fine meal, because mediocrity has no place on Prospect Street." Old Town, too, offered gastronomic wonders about which George rhapsodized as he steered the bus onto Interstate 5 and headed for the historic state park. The steak burrito at Fred's was "a man's dish," he told us -- two and a half pounds of steak strips, guacamole, sour cream, beans, and other tasty ingredients. "It'll hurt you!" he said, in admiration. The chicken chingaderas, he continued, looked like a hockey puck, "and like they say on television, it's a mouthful of joy. Oh yes, it is." But we should be mindful that restaurants in Old Town all closed at 9:00 p.m., George advised.

The guides on two other bus tours, City Sightseeing San Diego and San Diego Scenic Tours, did not provide the flights of fancy proffered by George. The outstanding feature of the $23 City Sightseeing San Diego tour was its bright red double-decker bus. This company is a newcomer to the San Diego sightseeing scene, having begun operations in April. Its bus covers a circuit that runs roughly from downtown through the Gaslamp Quarter, up to Balboa Park, down to Old Town, then back downtown. Passengers can get on and off at any of the stops, hearing narration along the way from a guide who's not also driving the bus.

Patrick was the name of our cicerone when I climbed aboard the City Sightseeing bus outside the gates of the cruise-ship terminal. I took a seat up on the open-air level, right behind him. He wore a bright red baseball cap, a necklace of seashells, tan shorts, and a red and white Hawaiian shirt. "Tuesdays are Hilo Hattie days," he said, explaining the Islands-inspired attire. The fledging tour company had struck a deal to transport passengers from the Monarch of the Seas cruise ship, which visits San Diego every Tuesday, to the Gaslamp purveyor of Hawaiiana. (Hilo Hattie pays for this service.) On our way to the Gaslamp, Patrick chattered about Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo's 1542 discovery of San Diego Bay, the Midway aircraft carrier museum, and the use of the Kansas City Barbeque for a scene in the movie Top Gun. ("It's hard to believe it came out 20 years ago," he said.)

Everyone on the bus disembarked at Hilo Hattie, but about ten guests from a nearby youth hostel climbed on and rode the bus to the zoo. Then they all got off, leaving only the driver, Patrick, and me aboard. "We haven't been packed a lot," Patrick acknowledged. "But usually we have more than this." I didn't mind. I asked Patrick about his background.

Now 40, Patrick had gotten a "hospitality degree" in tourism and destination development, he told me. "But I used to work for TWA as a flight attendant. That was the best job I ever had." A baseball fan, he'd been able to visit ballparks all over the country. But when American Airlines bought TWA, he'd dropped to the bottom of the seniority list. "That's when I got involved with stand-up comedy." He'd lived in Denver and aspired to work his way up to professional comedic status while supporting himself with other jobs. "I was supposed to go to Africa in December working for a geological survey company. Then, like, two days before I was supposed to leave, they laid everybody off!" He had already quit his previous job, sublet his apartment, even had a going-away party. In his scramble to find an alternate plan, he moved to San Diego, where a friend had offered him the use of a spare bedroom. He found an online ad mentioning City Sightseeing San Diego's need for tour guides, and he loved the thought of being able to work on his tan while getting paid. A week of training helped to compensate for his lack of familiarity with the city. Although the company had a script, "It's like an outline," he told me. "You have to add to it, but I love history, and I probably already know more about San Diego than a lot of natives." He reveled in the performance aspects of the job, he added. "The more people I have laughing -- that's where I get my energy from. And I have a need for attention. I'm a Sagittarius."

Even though I was the only person on the bus, Patrick described the sights we passed. I caught some discrepancies between what he told me and fact, but for the most part they were small ones. He claimed, for example, that San Diego City College was the first community college in the state (the college's website says it was third). He claimed that the lighted gaslamps in the Gaslamp Quarter are the originals (the Gaslamp Quarter Historical Foundation says they're not). But he seemed to try at least to approximate the truth.

So did Mike, my driver/guide for Scenic San Diego's morning city tour. Mike picked me up at the bus stop in front of the Kings Inn in Hotel Circle in a bus that was less plush than Contactours' bus. A scuffed rubber mat ran up the aisle, and there was no toilet. We made our way to a half dozen other hotels, collecting Mike's passengers. Some would spend the next ten hours with him, not only touring the city but also taking a harbor cruise and then proceeding to an afternoon visit to Tijuana. Mike asked the retired couple from Sydney, Australia, to show him their passports, and he did the same for the three high-spirited couples from Turkey who clambered aboard in Old Town. Although the Turks had their documents, Mike warned the men that when they later reentered the United States, one of them might be pulled over to the secondary inspection station. If that happened, the interruption might be brief, but it also might consume several hours. Mike would be able to wait for about 15 minutes, but beyond that, any Turk who was delayed would have to make his way back downtown by trolley. "Every now and then, it's been a little more touchy," the driver said, apologetic. But the Turks shrugged their shoulders and said they'd take the risk.

As we came down the Front Street exit off Interstate 5, heading south into downtown, we passed an old man holding a sign announcing his lack of shelter. "Are there a lot of homeless people in San Diego?" the Australian matron inquired.

"Plenty!" Mike replied. But that had a lot to do with San Diego's climate, he said. "After all, would you rather be homeless in New York or Chicago or in San Diego?" he asked the woman.

"It's sad," she commented. Mike didn't seem to be losing sleep over it. Many of the derelicts more or less chose to be on the street, he told the woman, adding that plenty of work was available for those who wanted it.

I later learned that Mike had been born in San Diego, and though he'd lived in several other places, he'd spent a dozen or so years here as an adult. He seemed happy to brag about the city's accomplishments ("only the second in the nation to set aside a large parcel of land for a city park," "largest outdoor organ in the world") but also at ease deflating its pretensions. When our bus moved north of Broadway downtown, for example, he offered, "If I were to tell you we had a financial district, this would be it. Nothing but a bunch of banks and attorneys' offices. A far cry from Wall Street, right?" Later he informed the group, "We do have a Little Italy. But let me emphasize how little it is. There's basically just a couple city blocks dedicated to some fine Italian restaurants." The Maritime Museum he characterized as "kind of small but quaint."

He did boast, "We've got the nicest climate in the world" but won points from me for the accuracy of his rainfall figure ("like, 11 inches a year, if we're lucky!") and for pointing out that the natural disaster San Diegans most fear isn't earthquakes but wildfires. (No other guide mentioned that, and statements about the average annual rainfall ranged from 5 inches to a foot.)

Mike shared a story about San Diego's namesake that I had never heard before (but later substantially confirmed with a 1988 article in the Journal of San Diego History). San Diego de Alcalá (a.k.a. St. Didacus) "worked at a Franciscan friary back in the mid-1400s, and evidently when he was there, several miraculous events took place due to his efforts," the guide explained. One of the most significant wonders occurred 100 years after he died. King Philip's son Carlos had suffered a serious injury, and desperate to save him, the king had ordered the Franciscan's corpse dug up and "put it in bed with his son.... The next day Carlos was healed. That's a true story," Mike informed the group, adding, "I know I'd be healed, too, if I had a 100-year-old corpse in bed with me, wouldn't you?" The Franciscan was canonized 22 years later, and in 1602 the Spanish explorer Sebastián Vizcaíno arrived here in a ship that bore the new saint's name. Vizcaíno changed the name of the bay from San Miguel (as Cabrillo had called it) to San Diego.

By 11:30, Mike had dropped off most of his passengers at the waterfront for their harbor cruise. He took a few others to Seaport Village, where they ambled off to browse. I asked Mike about the Tijuana portion of the package. His passengers would have only about 90 minutes on their own to explore Tijuana, he said. The trip down and back would consume the rest of the afternoon. Some people felt disappointed. "They kind of expect it to be so much more. But depending on your perspective, it's changed so much! Hugely!" Other visitors delighted in Tijuana's anarchic hurly-burly, he said. "I made almost $120 in tips alone yesterday, just because my Tijuana group had so much fun." He added that when the tips were combined with his base pay of $12 an hour, "It makes this job fairly lucrative." As a four-year veteran, he was at the top of his company's pay scale. Other drivers might earn a base of just $9 or $10 an hour. "But a lot of these guys are basically losers," he said. "I hate to say that. But they're really lazy. They don't want to hustle it or work it."

Boat People

Both the Hornblower and San Diego Harbor Excursion cruises follow the same format: the boats motor from their berths next to Broadway Pier up through the north part of the bay to the mouth of the harbor; then they return to their bases. After discharging some passengers and taking on others, they head south, passing under the Coronado Bay Bridge and down to Naval Station San Diego at 32nd Street. Both charged $17 for half the bay and only $5 more for the second hour of touring. On both I observed that it was easier for passengers to tune out the guide's spiel than it was for passengers on the tour buses. The boats are so big that many people can't even see the guide; as a result, the commentary can sound like a voice on the radio -- easy to ignore without appearing rude. So people chat or line up at the snack bars or use the restrooms or direct their attention to the panoramas.

On the Hornblower cruise, I tried to concentrate on what the guides were saying, but I had to work at it. Two young men handled the narrative duties (one on the north bay and the other on the south), and while they were professional, their dispassionate delivery made me feel they wouldn't take it personally if no one was listening. At one point, the guy who delivered the north-bay spiel appeared not to be paying attention to his own words. He mentioned that the Shelter Island public boat-launching ramp was "fairly close to the only entrance to the bay," then minutes later said the same thing about the public fishing pier. "I'm sorry," he interrupted himself. "I'm getting all mixed up. That made no sense." The same young man announced that "if you have your home on the very top" of Point Loma, "you not only get a great view of the bay, but if you walk to the other side of the house, you actually get a great view of the ocean directly on the other side." He stated that the Navy dolphins, whose enclosures are visible from the tour boats, "actually get their teeth brushed every night, and they live three times longer than dolphins do in the wild." (According to a Navy spokesperson, the dolphins get their teeth brushed a couple of times a week, and Navy dolphins live "several years longer" than the 27 to 30 years they're believed to live in the wild; one Navy dolphin is 45.)

On the San Diego Harbor Excursion cruise, our guide, Richard Coates, was far more commanding. A jowly man with white hair and matching mustache, Coates had a couple of careers before he turned to tour guiding. Now 70, he spent 25 years in the Navy, then taught algebra and trigonometry to adults. In the 1990s, he went to travel-agent school and worked at that for a couple of years. He seems a natural at his present work. He has a stentorian voice that he amplifies with a handheld microphone and the oratorical style of a circus ringmaster. "See that ship over there?" he boomed, as we passed the Star of India. "That's the oldest active commercial sailing ship in the world! Built on the Isle of Man in 1863, that ship has circumnavigated the globe 21 times!! That lady's...been...around!!"

With four separate decks, the Harbor Excursion boat was more commodious than the square-rigger. It was homier, adorned with pots of plastic bamboo, toy surfboards, glass beach floats, and tiny life preservers inscribed with the words "Aloha" and "Sleep-Eat-Surf." Cartoonish tropical fish, lobsters, and sea stars hung from suspended fish netting. A group of noisy fourth graders from the South Bay was among the passengers, and by 10:10 a.m. many were crowding in around the snack bar to buy potato chips, M&M's, and sodas. But some sat on the upper deck, where Coates held court from a portable padded seat on a ledge.

His coppery legs dangled from his perch. "See over there, to the right of Tom Ham's Lighthouse," he commanded. "There's an inlet carved back in the 1930s by the Navy! They wanted to have access to the Naval Training Center and the Marine Corps Recruit Depot. Now, the Marine barracks in San Diego opened in 1921 and converted to training in 1925. They've been training Marines there ever since. They have a graduation every Friday. You want to go? Go to graduation! Starts at ten o'clock. Go early!"

A moment later Coates pointed out a grayish blue house near Shelter Island where he claimed the Real World television series was filmed about three years ago. When we moved beyond Shelter Island, he posed a rhetorical question. "You want to learn more about the history of San Diego? Down below that hill is La Playa. Some of the first residents of that area were Chinese. They were out here digging for the black abalone. You could just walk out in the water and pick 'em up. Then they would make trips down to the shores of Mexico to pick up the larger red abalone. And what would they do with them? Well, the abalone itself is very tasty. But the shells are what they wanted. They made jewelry out of those."

The day after I took the boat tour with Coates, I called him at his home and asked how he knows all the stuff he includes in his narrations. "I get on the computer, and I go off in all directions finding things," he explained. The result is a rundown that includes unusual tidbits. Coates pointed out, for example, that the big pink mansion surrounded by palm trees near the top of Point Loma was once the home of Reuben H. Fleet ("the one who set up the first airmail system in the United States in 1917!"). Ballast Point, he tells his listeners, "got its name because the Yankee traders and sailors used to come out here, and they would have cobblestones in the keel of their boats. They needed those as ballast to make the trip around the Horn. Then when they got here, they would dump 'em out and load up with things like whale oil. We had a whaling station right here at Ballast Point. At the peak of the whaling industry, they harvested 55,000 gallons of whale oil right here in the bay."

When the boat had turned around and was passing North Island, Coates announced that the world's first amphibious flight took place not far from here. An aviator named Glenn Curtiss did that in 1911, he added. When I later followed Coates's example and checked this factoid on the Internet, I found numerous sites that confirmed it. I also found that a 90-pound woman named Tiny Broadwick made the first freefall parachute jump from North Island in 1914, not the "first parachute jump ever," as Coates announced.

If one theme of the harbor tours predominates, it's American militarism. There's so much military hardware visible -- the nuclear submarines tied up next to Point Loma, the Nimitz and Reagan aircraft carriers, the Midway. Jayhawk Coast Guard helicopters hover, S-3 Vikings take off and land at North Island, and SEAL insertion boats slice through the water. Coates sounded proud when he pointed out the Navy ammunition bunkers at North Island. "Those are loaded with bombs, missiles, rockets," he said. He grew more enthusiastic off the 32nd Street naval station ("second-largest naval station in the United States!"), where the FSF-1 Sea Fighter, an experimental Navy catamaran, got his vote for "the most impressive ship" in the harbor. "That ship will do 50 knots!" he exclaimed. "That's 57H miles an hour. And it has more firepower than 100 battleships." On my Hornblower cruise, the South Bay guide sounded most awed by the USS Princeton, a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser. "Those are considered to be the most lethal and powerful class of warships on the face of the planet," he said. "Just one of them could take out a third-world country all by itself. Onboard they have 122 vertical-launch tubes that fire the Tomahawk cruise missile and the harpoon missile -- the ones that hug the surface of the water and at the very last minute hop up and hit their target. They also have the anti-ship, anti-air, anti-submarine warfare missiles onboard. And if that's not enough weapons, they have 54-caliber deck cannons on the bow and stern that fire about 10 to 12 miles out."

SEALs and Trolleys

The SEAL tour boats, operated by the local branch of Historic Tours of America (the same company that owns the Old Town Trolleys), are bright blue contraptions topped with blue-and-white-striped canopies and decorated with images of seals wearing masks and snorkels. These vehicles perform the amusing trick of driving down Harbor Drive to the Shelter Island boat ramp and then rolling into the bay. When the vehicle pulls out of its base at the Seaport Village parking lot, the crew plays the theme from Gilligan's Island. The Pirates of the Caribbean music accompanies every launch, and other musical selections carry the cornball theme further.

"First Mate Kimmy" was our guide the morning a young family of four and I climbed aboard. Kimmy explained that unlike the converted World War II landing craft used for tourism on the East Coast, our conveyance had been built in upstate New York four and a half years ago and cost about $250,000. "So you break it, you buy it!" she chirped.

Kimmy made a number of statements I'm pretty sure were true (that Attack of the Killer Tomatoes was filmed in the parking lot of the old police station next to Seaport Village, for example, or that San Diego's once-large tuna industry had relocated to Mexico and other countries such as Samoa to escape excessive American regulation). But she mixed these in with gems that seemed to go over the heads of the touring family but boggled me. Kimmy told us that Little Italy was a "mostly residential" neighborhood located "on the hillside" adjoining Lindbergh Field and formed when "hundreds of thousands" of Italian Americans had migrated there to work in the tuna industry. She said the reason Charles Lindbergh had had to use a periscope on his famous transatlantic crossing was that "even the windshield [of the Spirit of St. Louis] was used to hold fuel." She identified Point Loma as "a 500-foot-long hill jutting into the Pacific" and pointed to concrete patches on its face that she claimed sealed up the mouths of pollutant-leaking abandoned coal mines. She declared that Scripps Institution of Oceanography conducted its research on the institute's pier on San Diego Bay. When we passed the helicopter hangars on North Island, she said, "During World War II, 40 percent of our workforce was women, and just beyond those hangars there were a couple of factories. That's actually where Rosie the Riveter worked," she exclaimed, as if Rosie had been a real person. "As some of you may know, her and her fellow women were able to make 11 B-24 bombers in a 24-hour period."

The tourist family looked as though they were loving the SEAL tour. The weather was halcyon, and we spent a long interval off Point Loma circling the bait dock where sea lions lolled. The Navy dolphin trainers were working that morning, and that provided more grist for Kimmy's mill. Although we caught no clear sight of the dolphins, the guide held up a picture of one with a camera affixed to his fin. "That's one of the ways the Navy's utilizing these guys in Iraq right now," she said. "They can patrol the harbor. If they see something that's not supposed to be there, they can go up and tell the sailors. The sailor will then give them a buoy to put on the obstruction, and then we can send one of our frogmen down there to destroy it. But dolphins and sea lions use sonar, and they're able to detect what our computers cannot detect. So they're happy to be working with the U.S. Navy."

I talked to Lorin Stewart, the director of operations for Historic Tours of America's San Diego arm. Poised and gracious, Stewart grew up in suburban San Jose and studied theater in college, then worked in London as an actor for several years (including three with the Royal Shakespeare Company). When he returned to the United States in 1989, he took a job as a guide and trolley driver for the tour company's newly opened San Diego branch. It seemed like a move that would allow him to use his skills. That proved true, but his enthusiasm soon caught the eye of the company's higher-ups, and he began a quick climb through the management ranks. (This year Stewart is serving as chairman of the board of directors for the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau, a volunteer position.)

He says planning for the San Diego SEAL tours began in 1999, and the initial cruise took place in August 2001. "It was one month before 9/11," he points out. The aftermath of the New York terrorist strike rocked leisure-travel operations across America, and for the San Diego amphibious operation, "It was a very challenging time." Stewart says at times the company let passengers ride for free to keep the vehicles out in the public eye. Besides needing to attract customers, the operation required fine-tuning. For about two years, it covered both Mission Bay and San Diego Bay, an itinerary that took at least two hours, sometimes more. "The on-and-off trolley tour is unique in that if you have to go to the bathroom, you can get off," Stewart says. "But asking a group of people to stay anywhere for two hours was a problem." Stewart solved it by eliminating the Mission Bay leg and extending the time on San Diego Bay. At 90 minutes rather than two hours-plus, the tours have gotten a "phenomenal" response, Stewart told me. Over the Fourth of July weekend, the amphibious vehicles each day had carried some 500 people, the majority of whom had filled out comment cards testifying to their satisfaction, he claimed.

The company's Old Town Trolley tours transport almost twice that many customers on the busiest days. When the trolley tours were introduced in Key West, Florida, in the early 1970s, they were an innovation, according to Stewart. Up to then, the Gray Line bus model -- four-hour (or so) city surveys in which the tourists got off the bus only for a break at some programmed destination -- had dominated the guided-tour business. "You stayed together as a group," Stewart says. But in the do-your-own-thing, have-it-your-way climate of that era, people seemed thrilled by the option of getting off their tour vehicle when they came to an attraction they wanted to explore, then rejoining a later one. This was the fundamental twist the Historic Tours of America founders offered. The biggest challenge of running such a business is having enough vehicles on the street so that people don't have to wait long once they're ready to reboard. (About two dozen Old Town Trolleys are moving through San Diego's streets during the busiest times of the year.) But the trolleys have never been merely a transportation service. As long as they're on the trolley, riders are treated to patter from their driver about Cabrillo's discovery of the bay, Kate Sessions's role in developing San Diego's horticultural landscape, Alonzo Horton's development schemes downtown -- the usual subjects. (Another fixture is the prerecorded voice of impressionist Rich Little giving safety injunctions in the famous cadences of John Wayne, Richard Nixon, Humphrey Bogart, Kermit the Frog, and other onetime celebrities.)

Unlike my experience on the SEAL tour, I didn't hear any gross exaggerations the day I took the Old Town Trolley. But I confessed to Stewart I wasn't sure what difference it made if someone goes back to Missouri thinking coal was once mined on Point Loma or Horton founded downtown in 1900 rather than 1867. Does it matter? I asked him. "The darnedest things can come out of our cast members' mouths," he acknowledged. "But personally, I think it matters," he continued. "The content has to be accurate." At the same time, "We don't want people who are historians. We want people who can tell a good story. Have a great time. Tell a joke or two.... It's a balancing act."

Ghostly Tours

Stewart's Ghosts and Gravestones tour was another balancing act, but one upon which he brought down the curtain last year. "We started the ghost tour right around the same time as the SEAL tour," he told me. It began as a straightforward narrative of the history of sites like the Whaley House that over time have become associated with supernatural phenomena. "A bunch of people liked that," he said. "But an equal number of people thought it was absolutely boring. They expected ghosts to come down and fly at them." The latter tended to be nonbelievers celebrating a special occasion with their ghost-believing spouses or children or friends.

Stewart says the nonbelievers pelted him with negative feedback, and he eventually added elements to the tours "to engage their brains." He and his team created costumes, scripts, lights, stagecraft, and magic. "It grew to this huge thing," he says. "And all of a sudden, the comment cards soared. The nonbelievers started loving the tour." But the believers for the first time started writing "not cards but letters!" They contained angry accusations: "You were making fun of this most important subject. I was having a spiritual experience, and your clown came and scared the spirits away. I want my money back!" they demanded.

"It was a nightmare," Stewart says. Another realization also was troubling. Stewart says in all the market research ConVis has done over the years into what draws visitors to San Diego, "No one in any survey anywhere associated death and fright and ghosts with San Diego." That might be the case for a city like London or Boston or Savannah (where Stewart claims 18 different ghost tours operate). But he came to believe that ghost tours in San Diego were "a square peg in a round hole," and on October 31, 2005, he decided to close that part of his operation.

Thirty-six-year-old Charles Spratley was on his honeymoon in Las Vegas when a friend text-messaged him about Stewart's decision. Spratley and this friend had both worked for Stewart's ghostly operation, and they'd been yearning to launch a version of their own. "We'd wanted to put a darker spin on it than Historic Tours of America did," Spratley recalls. "Theirs wasn't bad, but it was Disneyish, and I've always found that history is rarely Disneyish. I always say I like to tell the good, the bad, and the heinous."

At the end of March, Spratley, Andrea Rustad, and a third friend named Sean Shiraishi (a former curator for the San Diego Historical Society) started Ghostly Tours in History. Every Thursday through Saturday evening they conduct an excursion that's been likened to "what would happen if Edgar Allan Poe ever did the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland." Customers ride in a rented "limo bus" that itself hints of macabre decadence. The interior is plush and black, and the mirrored ceiling reflects passengers' fractured images. Banquette seats line the perimeter, except for an area where a full bar has been arranged. On the night I joined them, mournful organ music played in the background; I thought of Disney's Haunted Mansion.

Spratley was the lead guide that evening, though Shiraishi accompanied us. The three principals take turns shouldering the group-leading tasks. Spratley had donned a broad-brimmed black hat, a black rifle coat over striped brown pants, and a yellow silk waistcoat. A red coral fob in the shape of a Buddha's head dangled from the waistcoat, and Spratley grasped a walking stick with a pewter handle. Everything we would visit that evening dated from between 1850 and 1900 -- "the age of the reign of Victoria," he announced. "It's a very interesting time in history." While prizing gentility and invention, the Victorians had also spread venereal disease, according to the guide. "Drug abuse was rampant. Domestic violence skyrocketed. And, of course, probably one of my favorite inventions of the Victorian Age was the serial killer. The first reported one was Jack the Ripper in 1888. The first American serial killer was Henry Holmes in 1893. He was a physician who killed women at the Chicago World's Fair."

Spratley said he wanted us to be aware of the difference between a "residual haunt" (like Mrs. Whaley, who's reputed to lurk around the top of the stairs at the Whaley House) and an "active" haunt. "A residual haunt by classical definition is not a ghost," he lectured. "This is more like a psychic imprint left on time. A record that keeps repeating the same thing over and over." Active haunts, in contrast, "are self-aware. They are able to do things...move objects, touch people." He hinted we might encounter an active haunt at our first stop, the Star of India.

Our driver double-parked, and Spratley swept us off the limousine and onto the old sailing ship. Then he led us below deck, the setting for several of the ship's ghost stories. One concerned the captain. He had caught scarlet fever on the Star's first voyage and died while en route to the East Indies. Poltergeist activity had been attributed to him, and while Spratley dismissed such activity as harmless, "Something much darker is going on across the way," he intoned, pointing to the first mate's cabin. One of the men who had occupied it had slit his throat one night while drunk and depressed, and though the ship's surgeon had patched him up, he had pulled out his stitches and bled to death. In recent years when teachers chaperoning students' overnight stays on board had slept in the cabin, some had reported feeling "a presence in the room with them," Spratley claimed. "One even left in the middle of the night because the bedsheet got violently ripped off her bed twice. She left the ship never to return."

"Whoa," someone in our group murmured.

Spratley recounted two more tales -- one about a Chinese fellow who'd been "literally ripped to pieces by the anchor chain" and another about a Scottish stowaway who'd fallen off the main mast, shattered both legs, and died a protracted death. When alive, this boy had loved playing a Scottish variation of tag in which the tagger draws an S ("for Scotland") on his target's back, Spratley said. "And many people who have worked here have felt an S on their back. Or a slight shove away from the main mast, perhaps to serve as a warning."

"I study the paranormal," Spratley said to me as we strode back to the limo. "I don't like the term 'ghost hunter.' Because when you use the word 'hunter,' it implies aggression, and I don't like that. It is what it is. Why look for it? Anyway, the watched pot never boils. Sometimes you find the most interesting things without looking for them."

We didn't find ghostly activity down in the Gaslamp Quarter, but Spratley told more stories there. After our group had assembled at the intersection of Third and Island avenues, the guide instructed us to look up at the corner room on the third story of the Horton Grand Hotel -- the most haunted room in the place, by his account. "The story goes that there was a gambler by the name of Roger Whittaker who was caught cheating at cards one night." Shot in the gut after a fight broke out in a saloon, he escaped in the melee. "Unfortunately an abdominal wound is quite a leaker, as you know, and his assassin managed to follow the bloody trail up the street to his room." The pursuer kicked down the door, found Whittaker cowering in the armoire, and shot him dead. Since then there'd been reports of people being kept awake all night by the sounds of a phantom poker game and other mysterious phenomena, Spratley said. Today it was possible to stay in Room 309, he asserted, "but you're looking at about a year-long wait. It seems like there's a long list of people that revel in hauntings and paranormal phenomena. Let's hope we don't run into any of those sick bastards tonight, okay?"

At Tesoro, the Mexican restaurant at 548 Fifth Avenue, Spratley talked about how the basement, now a nightclub, had served as one of San Diego's first mortuaries. The furniture store on the building's first floor had helped supply the coffins, and a furniture-store employee had once used a Smith and Wesson .38 to "turn his head into a canoe" in the small room he occupied at the back of the store. Since then tenants had described feelings of being watched and reported strange problems with the elevator, according to Spratley.

We went to a couple of other places during the course of the evening, but to my surprise, our itinerary didn't include the Whaley House. "A lot of the stories about the Whaley House are simply not true," Spratley sniffed. "They're not historically possible." The house's owners over the years had promoted it as a haunted structure, and that had generated revenue that had gone toward preserving it. Spratley thought this was a good thing. He'd worked as a docent in the house, and he appreciated its historic importance, he indicated.

At the news that Spratley had worked in the house, one of our group, a young blonde from Yorba Linda, perked up. "What did you experience working there?" she pressed. "Did you see any paranormal activity?" He answered, "I will say in all honesty there is something about the house.... I'm a firm believer that energy resides, and it stays, and all energy is emotion." Having worked inside the house, Spratley said he had sensed "a lot of anger...a lot of oppression.... There is something weird about the house. But what it is has to be investigated first from a historical perspective."

Walking Tourists

Another enterprise competes with Spratley and his partners. It's run by Michael Brown, a native San Diegan who, unlike Spratley, has no qualms about calling himself a ghost hunter. Brown leads tourists on foot through Old Town twice a night every Thursday through Sunday during the summer months, charging $19 a head for these outings. "I've been ghost-hunting in Old Town for over six and a half years now," Brown told the group of 30 or so on the night I took the tour. "I had my first two experiences at the Whaley House. Anyone not familiar with the Whaley House?" No one spoke up. "That home is listed as one of America's top-ten most haunted houses."

A tanned, athletic-looking man who wore shorts and a sport shirt, Brown has a rapid-fire, no-nonsense delivery style. "If you believe in ghosts or if you don't, that's okay with me," he stated. "I'm not here to change your mind or your opinion. I'm just here to share some of my experiences." In front of the Racine and Laramie Building, he told us about the ghostly footsteps he'd heard one night. "Another night I made several loops around Washington Square and the plaza." He pointed to the bench he had sat on while panning the scene with his camera. "It was early in the morning. There was no one here. One pan I started from the left and worked my way around very slowly to the Colorado House and the Wells Fargo Building. To the left of the double doors, there was a small child standing. It was not a shadow. It was a solid-block form, standing away from the wall. I could see the arms, the legs, the head, the torso. As I focused in, it disappeared."

Brown never joked, and he doled out only snippets of history; instead, the subject of this tour was all the weird stuff Brown supposedly has seen and heard during the last half-dozen years. Throughout the evening, he maintained the same take-it-or-leave-it tone. But after an hour, he shepherded our group into the Jolly Boy restaurant and had us take seats set up in rows in one of the dining rooms. He passed around photographs where most of the evidence of the ghostly presences took the form of a white blob on the print. Then he opened a laptop computer and played examples of "electronic voice phenomena" ("EVPs") that he claimed to have recorded. Lots of people on the tour seemed impressed by this documentation.

I felt more entertained by the walking tour of Banker's Hill I took a few weeks later. It was led by an amiable fellow named Marc Menkin. Born and raised on the East Coast, Menkin and his wife Darlynne moved to San Diego in 1990 when she got a job as the producer of a consumer-news unit at Channel 8. Marc found work as a sales rep, but in his spare time he explored San Diego. He made notes as he did so, and before long, "I knew about a lot of hidden stuff," he says. He'd show friends these sights when they came to town. He says friends began telling him he should start a business.

He took the plunge in July 2003, and by November 2005, Darlynne had decided to give up broadcast journalism to help Marc with his enterprise, Where You Want to Be Tours. On their website, you'll see an elaborate schedule showing walking and biking tours at least twice every day to locales including the "neighborhoods of Balboa Park," downtown, Pacific Beach, and La Jolla. I called to make reservations, but Darlynne told me she and her husband had recently been preoccupied with private groups. A couple of weeks passed before the Menkins had a tour open to the public.

That was the Banker's Hill excursion. Our group included three middle-aged Hispanic couples from Bakersfield who'd heard about the tour from friends, as well as a San Diego couple who were friends of the Menkins. Marc introduced the neighborhood. "It's called Banker's Hill because in the early 1900s, a lot of people who built up downtown San Diego built their mansions and big homes up here," he said. Even at the busiest times of the year, it remained tranquil. We'd experience that tranquility this morning, he promised, as well as see another important feature of the city. "A lot of people think of San Diego as the beach and the bay and the swaying palm trees," Marc said. "It is all that, but it also has almost 70 canyons."

Over the course of our meander, the Menkins led us across the suspension footbridge that crosses the canyon interrupting Spruce Street between Front and Brant. On the wooden structure that unites Quince Street over Maple Canyon, the couple had everyone toss pebbles at a target below. But most of the sights that Marc brought to our attention were smaller in scale. He had us pause to admire the elaborate wooden gate in front of the house at 3340 Second Avenue. "It's got the Asian influence going," he noted. "Very feng shui." In the next block, he told us that the garage of one residence had formerly been a carriage house. He pointed out impressive stands of bottlebrush and giant bird-of-paradise and bamboo. "It just amazes me how something can grow and look so polished," he marveled about the latter.

Twice that morning, we got an unexpected bonus. When someone in our group admired a house we were passing, the owner, who happened to be puttering in his front yard, told us he and his wife had just completed a major remodel. He wound up inviting us into his courtyard to see the new construction, disclosing as we lingered that the late San Diego Union sportswriter Jack Murphy had resided there. At another point, Darlynne stopped to chat with a fellow she'd met on previous rambles. He was the property manager at the Asian-influenced home inhabited by Golden Door-owner Deborah Szekely, and he invited us in for a peek at the grounds. One of the couples from Bakersfield snapped photos.

A few streets farther along, we stopped in front of a Palladian dwelling on the corner of Curlew and West Thorn. A Prudential Realty sign stood in front, and Marc told us he'd heard that the asking price was $2.7 million (it's $2.8 million). We admired the ivy crisscrossing the garden walls, and Marc drew our attention to a brass plaque. It looked like a historical marker. But it read, "On this site in 1897, nothing happened." Everyone chuckled.

It occurred to me later that the plaque might be inaccurate. Perhaps the house hadn't been built back then. Or maybe it had been, and that year someone had had a heart attack in it or birthed a baby or come up with an idea that changed people's lives. Who would know? On the other hand, there was no disputing that it amused the passing sightseer. And who could argue with that?