Big city living
We made the escape a couple of weeks ago. It was only our second outing from the Valley since the onset of COVID-19. We didn’t know what to expect. At the time, San Diego County was furious at SDSU off-campus students for spiking virus infection rates. Boys and girls just wanna have fun, the students said.
College students were returning to campuses across the county, and this was leading to campus hot spots to the consternation of college presidents and state health officers. A national newspaper has been running a map of campus hot spots across the country. However, it appears that order has been restored, and many of those high college infection rates have been reduced.
SDSU, San Diego required testing of on-campus students and staff. A parking lot was dedicated to drive-thru testing, free to any student or campus worker. On-campus attendance became highly restricted. Infections dropped. San Diego County Supervisors calmed down as the county avoided slipping back to the most stringent purple regulations.
Our experience during our few days in “America’s Finest City” was fine. People there have embraced the message that mask wearing in public really slows down COVID transmission. One can be fined for not wearing a mask in the public spaces of my daughter’s condo. And non-maskers are not welcomed in grocery stores and restaurants. A guy claiming government suppression of his freedom to be unmasked can get pretty hungry.
There were some surprises. Due to a lower volume of travel, we were able to find a choice parking spot in Balboa Park. Spanish Village was lightly attended, and our favorite shop, The Pottery Guild, was open and empty. My behavior mirrored the article I read about a young woman in Wuhan who went crazy shopping once their quarantine was lifted. I liked a lot of the pottery I saw, and we bought several gifts.
Prior to entering the San Diego Museum of Art, also in Balboa Park, we received a safety briefing. Then, we were told to mask up, and our temperatures were taken by a notouch machine in the lobby. There was only one new exhibit of Rembrandt prints, but it felt so good to get out and be surrounded by art.
On our way back to my daughter’s condo, we stopped at North Park Produce. It’s not actually in North Park. However, there is lots of produce. We go for the large variety of olives and the dozen types of feta cheese. The bread products range from lavash to Afghan and pita breads. We do most of our food shopping at Valley stores, but NPP satisfies the more exotic food appetites within us. Eggplant salad, not a chuck wagon favorite, has yet to become a staple at Valley grocery stores. Egg foo yung might be as exotic as it gets in El Centro.
Our endless, intense summer has been devastating for my potted laurels so I decided to go in for more olive trees. Due to our limited retail universe, I couldn’t find what I wanted locally. So I shopped online and found a 50-acre nursery in El Cajon. We squeezed three small olive trees into our sedan on the way home from San Diego.
My longtime hope has been that a local non-profit would start a retail/ wholesale nursery to sell to garden shops throughout southern California. Numerous cacti, succulents and drought-resistant trees grow very well here, and canal water is cheap. There are jobs in landscaping and nursery stock production. Plus, Cal Fire is issuing grants for carbon sequestration or carbon capture. The city of El Centro has received three huge grants for tree planting, but the trees must be purchased from outside the Valley since there are no large nurseries capable of providing tree stock. It’s an enterprise worth looking into. And compared to most southern California cities, we can promise plenty of parking.