Find your heart, brain, courage (and beat an analogy to death) on The San Diego Old Town Trolley Tours

As I am currently in exile from my beloved San Diego I often spend evenings on the phone with people telling them what a perfect, beautiful, wonderful city it is and they often remind me to "be realistic." San Diego has a seedy underbelly, so I've been told. I've also been told not to forget about the crazy traffic, how badly people tailgate, how long it takes to get out of PB and how hard it is to find parking.

Maybe as the editor of this site and *wannabe*, scratch that *soon to be once again* San Diegan I view the city as the Emerald City that it is. I've been following the yellow brick road for so long, I don't CARE if it's run by some strange little man and his strange little hair dressers and horses that change color, it's still the freaking Emerald City dude, EMERALD CITY. (Did I beat that analogy to death enough yet?)

Gerry Braun of The Union Tribune lives in The Emerald City and has been feeling a little overworked and under the thumb of the Wizard (still beating, wait I got more).

Face it, last week felt awful, as though our entire city had a lightning rod attached to it. First the Padres collapsed, then the hillside on Mount Soledad came down. We hardly had time to say, “Gee, I hope it wasn't the water pipes,” when three water pipes blew near SeaWorld, flooding parts of Pacific Beach. All the while, the specter of a water shortage looms.

So The Wizard sent him on his own journey (on a San Diego tour bus no less)... to find his heart, which he turned out to have all the time, right there in San Diego.

The Santa Ana winds had swept every cloud from the sky, and as Conductor Jeff played Barbra Streisand's “On a Clear Day, You Can See Forever,” I lost track of what I was doing and forgot to check the eastern horizon for smoke.

Read the entire piece here. And book your adventure here.