On our recent trip to California, we had the opportunity to board the Midway in San Diego Harbor for a work event. We spent our day immersing in Navy culture with an afternoon on Coronado Island. After lunch, we strolled around the island, along the beach to the naval base and back to spend a couple of hours at the Hotel del Coronado, affectionately referred to, by the locals, as “Hotel Del”.
Coronado was incorporated as a town in 1890 and the “Del” was opened in 1888 and was, at the time, the largest resort hotel in the world. What is now the Naval Air Station North Island was once the first U.S. flying school. The flying school was opened by Glenn Curtiss at the beginning of World War I and he invited both the Army and Navy to use it for aviation training. The Navy took over the north end of the island as a naval air base in 1917. During World War II, North Island became a major continental base supporting forces in the Pacific.
During construction of the Hotel del, raw materials were hard to come by, so planing mills were built to plane the lumber shipped to the island, kilns were built to make brick and concrete and metal and ironworks shops were built. Labor was difficult to come by and Chinese immigrants from San Francisco made up most of the workforce. The Crown Room was assembled using pegs and glue and not a single nail. During the early-mid 20th century, the hotel hosted Presidents Harrison, McKinley, Taft and Wilson, baseball legend Babe Ruth and movie stars from Charlie Chaplin to Mae West to Clark Gable, Bette Davis and Ginger Rogers. During World War II, many of the rooms were taken over by navy pilots training on the base. Later guests have included every U.S. President from LBJ to George W. Bush, actors Kevin Costner, Gene Hackman and Brad Pitt and musicians Madonna and George Harrison.
After our afternoon at the del, we caught a ride over to the U.S.S. Midway for the private event. The Midway, named after the Battle of Midway, was commissioned in September of 1945 and was the largest ship in the world at the time. It weighed in at 45,000 tons, housed more than 100 aircraft and more than 4,000 sailors and marines and was too large to traverse the Panama Canal. Midway operated in the Vietnam war and was the flagship, coordinating the 38-day air campaign of 1991’s Operation Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf.
Our night on the Midway included the wearing of souvenir bomber jackets (a necessary amenity in the cold winds of a February night on deck), a tour of the Admiral and Captain’s quarters and rooms from which Desert Storm was planned and overseen, a delicious mashed potato bar, a drone show and dancing to the diverse sounds of Liquid Blue, a local band procured for the event.
Whether for an event or just a tour, the U.S.S. Midway Museum aboard the ship and the Hotel Del are well worth a visit if you find yourself in San Diego, California.
Post also published on our “Sunday Journal” site about our experiences.
Sources:
The Traveling Ridleys 
Cool. I visited the same ship. It was a conference event and they had a Navy Seal guy parachute in landing on the deck.
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