Old Town San Diego on a Sunday, and the tortillas that were worth the drive.

The plan, such as it was, involved getting there before the crowds and finding the tortillas my mom had heard about from someone whose name she could not remember. That is usually how her recommendations work. Sourced from a friend of a friend, delivered with complete confidence.

She was right, which is also usually how it works.

Old Town Mexican Cafe is on San Diego Avenue and it has a plate glass window facing the street. Behind the glass, a woman is making tortillas. Not in the back, not in a kitchen you cannot see. Right there, at a station visible from the sidewalk, pressing and turning and stacking in a rhythm that makes you stop walking without meaning to. The sound through the glass, if you stand close enough, is a clap-clap-clap-clap that does not stop. The restaurant calls them tortilleras. The Voice of San Diego once profiled one woman who had been doing it for 28 years and was producing around 800 corn tortillas per shift. You eat the tortillas warm, and they taste like someone made them, because someone did.

We stood at the window for longer than was probably normal. Nobody seemed to mind.

The Harney Street market was a few blocks over and running by the time we got there, which on a Sunday means somewhere around ten in the morning when the light is still good and the heat has not settled in yet. It is not a farmers market in any serious produce sense. It is an artisan market, which means jewelry and pottery and paintings and small ceramic things that you do not need but that seem very important in the moment. There were Dia de los Muertos pieces, painted skulls and framed prints, the kind of handmade folk art that lines the shops along San Diego Avenue and spills out into the booths on weekends.

My mom bought something small. She always does. She has a considered relationship with objects that I do not share, which means she can spot the one thing in a row of booths that is actually worth owning. I watched her pick up a painted ceramic piece and put it down three times before she bought it. She carries things like that for years.

What Old Town does well, on a Sunday, is layer. The mariachi from Fiesta de Reyes carries over from the courtyard without you having to look for it. The adobe buildings are low and white and have been there since the 1820s in some cases, which you feel even if you do not know the dates. It is a village layout, not a grid, which means you wander and double back and find the same booth from a different direction. The shops along San Diego Avenue are full of the same category of Mexican ceramic and folk art you find in the market, except inside, which is useful once the afternoon starts to warm up.

It is also, genuinely, a tourist area. The prices reflect that. Some of the shops are more postcard than craft. But on a Sunday morning with the market running and the tortilla window steaming and the mariachi floating over from a courtyard you cannot quite see, it does not feel performed. It feels like a place that has been doing this long enough to have settled into itself.

We did not need a plan. We needed the window and the warm tortillas and a few hours with no agenda. That is the whole trip.