Thanks to a suggestion made by our SD for Free columnist, my dad’s birthday was blissfully easy to plan this year. We decided to go to the Map and Atlas Museum of La Jolla and were able to arrange for a private tour — completely free of charge.
The museum is housed within the Merrill Lynch building on Fay Avenue, and is estimated (they won’t disclose the actual number) to showcase a collection worth around eight figures. It is made up of mobile walls and an elaborate hanging system that allows for changes to be made depending on the exhibit.
The museum is the brainchild of Michael Stone, a local philanthropist with an insatiable love for cartography and a desire to share it with the world.
The best part of the whole tour is guide Richard Cloward, a retired U.S. Navy captain without whom we would’ve been done in 20 minutes and wouldn’t have understood a fraction of what we were seeing. As it was, we ended up staying almost two hours — and there was still so much to learn. [Read more…]