Showing posts with label Old Town Trolley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Old Town Trolley. Show all posts

Thursday, April 21, 2016

Wyatt Earp's Pawnshop

I recently read and loved the novels Doc and Epitaph by Mary Doria Russell, about Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers.  When I was in San Diego on the Old Town Trolley Tour last week, pulling into the Gaslamp District, the guide pointed out a pawnshop that was started by Wyatt Earp when he moved to San Diego after the OK Corral.  I had to see it closer, so I got off the trolley and walked back a few blocks.  I had never been in a real pawn shop, but I had to go into this one. 


I asked the man working there, and he said, yes, it was started by Wyatt Earp, and that he used to live across the street.  That is now a shopping mall, but the inside of the pawn shop still looks, I imagine, like it did when it was built.

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

The Mormon Battalion Historic Site

Last week I was in San Diego.  We went to the zoo and saw the seals and even a whale in La Jolla, and I spent a day on the Old Town Trolley Tour.  I almost did not go, as I thought it might be too touristy, but it was well worth the price, convenient, and I saw so much.  I could have spent another day or two seeing the sites.


At the end of the tour in Old Town, I visited the Mormon Battalion Historic Site.  I grew up and still live a half-hour from Palmyra, New York, where the Mormon church was founded.  I am not a member, but as a genealogist, I spend time in the church's family search centers and I have been to Salt Lake City and to the big library there as well as seeing the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and other sites.  However, I did not know that a group of Mormons traveled to San Diego in 1847 from Iowa, before they settled in Salt Lake City.  The museum is a replica adobe building, and it is a really fantastic interactive display, including rumbling from a stampede, the night sky, thunderstorms, cedar wood scents, and photos that talk just like in Harry Potter!  I also got to pan for "gold", and having watched a documentary about the Klondike a few days earlier, I was anxious to try and found it a lot more difficult than I expected.  My "gold" nugget is on the upper right hand corner of the photo.