RoundAbout San Diego

I've occasionally heard that the Point Loma peninsula is hollow. The story is that the Navy hollowed it out and installed huge fuel tanks inside of it during World War II. While visiting Cabrillo National Monument I took the opportunity to ask the park ranger in the visitor center if there was any truth to this claim, or if it's just an urban legend. He assured me it was an urban legend.

According to the ranger, the Navy does maintain large fuel tanks on Point Loma, but for the most part they're above ground. There may be one or two small underground tanks, but there's no massive underground cistern. However, the ranger did say that Point Loma is riddled with underground tunnels, but they're off-limits to the public. He also said that if you want massive underground fuel tanks, you need to go to Hawaii. After Pearl Harbor the military realized the potential vulnerability of having above-ground fuel tanks there. If the Japanese had targeted the fuel tanks instead of the ships, they could have crippled the entire American fleet. Realizing this, the military subsequently moved the tanks on Hawaii underground.

Janet, Klaus, Alex, and I visited The Lavender Fields today.


Row upon row of all kinds of lavender


They even have a lavender maze


The gift store sells all sorts of oils, creams, soaps, shampoos, etc.


What better way to end a day out than with a wine tasting. Orfila Winery is just south east of Escondido on the road going out to the Wild Animal Park.


They offer a great tour of the wine making process and you can finish up with several tastes of their products which includes olive oils, vinegars, jams, mustards, relishes, etc.


Here's me with Janet and Klaus


And the gift store offers a ton of gourmet goodies to take home with you

(Originally posted on The Museum of Hoaxes)

For Christmas I received a great book, Weird U.S.: Your Travel Guide to America's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets by Mark Moran and Mark Sceurman. Immediately I flipped through it to find anything about San Diego, and soon came across the legend of Midgetville.

Midgetville refers to the legend of a town consisting of scaled-down houses built for little people. Midgetville is said to exist in various places throughout America. As Moran and Sceurman note, the most credible rumor locates such a town in Jefferson Township, New Jersey, on the former estate of circus mogul Alfred T. Ringling. There really is a collection of small-sized houses there that could conceivably have once been home to a colony of midgets. However, another very persistent legend locates a Midgetville in San Diego.

Moran and Sceurman don't go into much detail about the San Diego Midgetville, but I realized that I had heard this legend before (my wife had also heard it). This is how it goes: back in the 1930s a group of little people who had made a lot of money in Hollywood appearing in movies such as The Wizard of Oz supposedly came down to San Diego and built a collection of miniature houses on Mt. Soledad where they could live in comfort together. But of course, nobody seems to know exactly where on Mt. Soledad this group of small houses was or is, though everybody has heard of a "friend of a friend" who once accidentally found the houses (though this FOAF can never remember how to get back there).

Determined to find the houses, I did a google search and came across an article from 2003 written by Kenneth Smith for the Daily Aztec detailing his own efforts to track down San Diego's fabled 'Munchkin Houses'. After many false starts, he finally discovered that they were most probably "a group of four cottages on Hillside Drive in La Jolla... built by famed architect Cliff May." Although no midgets or little people were ever known to live in these houses, Smith says that, "The houses do indeed have smallish features, accentuated by an optical illusion. The steep road that passes them makes them seem even smaller than they actually are." Unfortunately only one of the four cottages remains standing, but Smith provides directions to find it: "take Hillside Drive from Torrey Pines Road. The house will be on your left-hand side. Look for the crazy midget handwriting." He also mentions that if you peek through the window (the house is unoccupied) you'll see "cobblestone-like tiled floors and a little round fireplace."

Of course, I had to see this for myself, even if no colony of Wizard-of-Oz midgets had ever lived there. So on New Year's Day I convinced my wife to accompany me on a search for the Munchkin House. The results were mixed. It was no problem finding Hillside Drive, but as it turns out Hillside Drive is fairly long. We were driving up and down it (as a line of cars formed behind us) wondering 'exactly which house on the left did he mean.' None of the houses leaps out at you and screams 'Munchkin House.' But finally we settled on one house that we figured must be it: Seventy-Four Seventy-Seven Hillside Drive. It had small windows and a small door. Plus, the address written beside the door looked a bit like 'crazy midget handwriting' (though I think Smith was joking about this). Ignoring the 'No Trespassing' sign (even though part of the legend of Midgetville is that the midgets who live there fiercely defend their land from the Bigs), I peeked through the window and saw the cobblestone-like tiled floors and a little round fireplace. So I think I found the Munchkin House, though I'm not 100% sure. It's certainly not anything that would catch your attention if you weren't specifically looking for it since it's really not that small, which made the trip a bit disappointing. But the weird thing is, I've already forgotten how to get back there.