Nine days away from home. Seven full days in Los Angeles. A trusted friend housesitter to mind the fort. An expensive doggie resort to stash the dogs. A long term parking lot off the airport. A wake up at 4AM on departure day.
Day one: Travel. Get the roller skate rental car. Try to adjust to driving in L.A. Wife is pretty good because she used to drive in Bethesda. We go to our hotel. Then to see our son and his apartment. Then back to hotel and a jet lagged sleep.
Day two: Son and his roomate take us to Santa Monica. We buy them lunch on the Ocean. We walk to the end of the pier as a good tourist should. Rt.66. Then over to Venice Beach. Wonderful time. Hippies still exist. Out to the Burbank suburbs and dinner.
Day three: Son picks up his mother for touring of Beverly Hills, and shopping not at Beverly Hills. I take the rental car and the GPS and go out to the north across the Antelope Nat'l Park toward Mojave. I buy myself a fantasy flight in a glider over the mountains. I drive home over those mountains on the amazing Angeles Forrest Highway. It takes a couple extra hours but it is so worth it. A spectacular view at every hairpin switchback turn. Back at hotel wife and I walk to authentic Mexican eatery. And debrief our separate adventures.
Day four: Son picks us up and takes us to Universal City and we tour around. Then a wonderful driving tour of Santa Monica up the Coast Highway, Pacific Palisades, and Malibu. Wife and I go to our new favorite local Vegan restaurant.
Day five: Son picks us up very early and we go to CBS and wait in line and get processed to go to a taping of "The Price is Right". This takes all day and is fun for us because we visit with son all day. We enjoy the show. We eat a fine dinner with son.
Day six: We go to Warner Bros. and spend the day. We go to a nice studio tour. See the sets, the back lots and etc. We stand by for Conan, and just barely don't get in, but we had not waited in line at all. We went back to North Hollywood and went to our favorite restaurant.
Day seven: We hang out at the hotel and in the neighborhood in the AM and I eat street food which is fun. We go to the original "Bog Boy" at Taluka Lake, but we don't eat there. We eat at Marie Callender's bakery. Then back to Warner Bros. . We have tickets for live studio audience at the new Chelsea Handler sit com starring Laura Prepon. This taping takes over six hours but we enjoy it very much and are entertained by a great comedian in between "takes". We go back to our hotel on the Hollywood Freeway without needing the GPS.
Day eight: Son picks us up and takes us to a fine Indian restaurant in Sherman Oaks. We cruise Beverly Hills and head up the mountains to Griffith Observatory for great views of the area and the mountains. We say a big goodbye to son. Later wife and I go back to our favorite restaurant and I have tofu chicken yellow curry for the third time and love it.
Day nine: Travel home day. Wake up to beautiful weather. All nine days are perfect weather. Apparently this is normal, except for occasional acid rain and wildfires. We head out to LAX which is a Sunday madhouse. Dark comes soon travelling east and Baltimore has not the summer it had when we left. It is cold and the leaves are turning. We leave the long term parking lot in wife's Altima. I suggest a debrief at the Double T Diner in Annapolis. But wife wants to go to Outback even though she is a Vegan. We have a nice dinner. Then we are back in our own beds.
The Next morning: We sat in the sun on the front porch with sweaters on. The big farm across the street was a freshly disked and planted field of grooved brown earth when we left ten days ago. Now it was full of green virgin winter wheat that looked like a 200 acre lawn. We sipped coffee with the barn cats underfoot. They were glad mommy was back. We wished each other welcome home. LLITTY :::::+:::::
Thursday, October 27, 2011
This is How We Get There.
Wife and I took a trip to California. We looked forward to it. And it turned out to be all that we hoped it would be and more. The most important and precious pleasure was seeing our son whom we had not seen in almost a year. We shopped in advance on line for the cheapest airfare. Hotel. Rental Car. Being a retired airline pilot, one might think I could have gotten a real deal on the airfare. But the real deal of employee discounts at the airlines is riding "space available". This means you only ride when there are extra seats. The airline industry has changed. There was a time that a full airplane was a rare event. If a flight canceled, there were seats on the very next flight. And tickets were refundable. Then government subsidies went away and fuel prices climbed twenty fold. The full airplane cattle car approach is now the norm. Even before 9-11 the experience of flying on an airliner had become drudgery. Where it used to be the best part of ones vacation or business trip. But since 9-11 the simple drudgery of full airplanes, middle seats, no amenities and no one being nice, has been replaced by a surreal nightmare of just getting there with your sanity. And your luggage. And a shred of dignity. I love to fly in any airplane, but I was dreading the travel days of our little vacation.
There was both good and bad on the travel days. Really, really noisy babies and toddlers during the entire flights both out and back. Oversized travellers who used part of my seat space both out and back. Full airplanes.
On the good side we flew non stop each way. Wife had a window seat and although her window was fogged on the way out to L.A., her flight home was clear all the way and she watched the entire country go by and with the prevailing wind the flight took a little over four hours.
We were on a 737. An airplane that used to barely make it halfway across the country. Now more efficient engines and airframes and winglets make the old venerable "seven three" a coast to coaster. I won't tell you the name of the airline we were on, but it's initials are AIR TRAN and it used to be Value Jet. Now I travel in spite of flying on an airplane.
LLITTY :::::+:::::
There was both good and bad on the travel days. Really, really noisy babies and toddlers during the entire flights both out and back. Oversized travellers who used part of my seat space both out and back. Full airplanes.
On the good side we flew non stop each way. Wife had a window seat and although her window was fogged on the way out to L.A., her flight home was clear all the way and she watched the entire country go by and with the prevailing wind the flight took a little over four hours.
We were on a 737. An airplane that used to barely make it halfway across the country. Now more efficient engines and airframes and winglets make the old venerable "seven three" a coast to coaster. I won't tell you the name of the airline we were on, but it's initials are AIR TRAN and it used to be Value Jet. Now I travel in spite of flying on an airplane.
LLITTY :::::+:::::
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Rambling Update
Today is Sunday. We've already had three beautiful days to make up for the rains. Now it is so nice I don't even know what to do. My wife has been sitting on the front porch lately about once a day. Her barn cats come over and sit with her. They run away when I come out to sit. They are semi "feral". The porch is in desperate need of a new floor. My wife doesn't seem to mind because it's all about the animals and they like the holes in the floor which give them instant access to the crawl space. I don't have the funds or energy for the new porch floor, but it would be a great fall project. We sit out there and drink coffee and watch the tractors work the large field across the street. That's when you know you are retired.
I am not a motor head. In one of my blogs I have a post about what a really bad mechanic I am. I have seven cars. One not running. One in California. I have two cars visiting that are not mine. In the last week or so, I have had three cars break down and wind up in various shops. Friday I picked up one of the cars from the shop. I drove it sixty miles and it broke down again. It is back in the shop. That was the second time in two weeks that I had two breakdowns in one day. I can't complain. There was a long period where all six cars just did their job. I'm bad about maintenance. I take them to Jiffy Lube, but that's it.
A while back, after our fly-in, a good buddy of mine made me an offer. This unnamed buddy, let's just call him Dempsey, had an idea. He suggested I let him base and store and work on his little sports car in my shed and he in return would work on my "Brittish piece of sh-t". Well, I have never been able to afford a mechanic to work on a hobby car. So I took him up on it. My little Brittish car is called a TR-6 and it was way not running. It could not even move with it's rusted brakes locked. It had not been driven in about 13 years. I have had it eight years and kept it high and dry in my shed and in 2003 I had patched the floorboards so it would not be like a "Fred Flintstone" car. Our first day of working on the thing was just getting the bees nests out of it and making sure the snakes would not come back. About three weeks after our "deal" I found myself driving the crazy little thing down the runway at 50 mph with no brakes. Fueled by a soda bottle full of 100LL aviation gas run through brand new fuel lines into a new fuel pump into the unknown carburators. We had robbed a battery out of my jeep. I was amazed the starter and the clutch and for that matter the engine itself, mostly worked. It was a long way to come from a "dead" car. After that drive I was happy and telling Dempsey he was a "genius" and a "wizard". And he was and is. But there is a long long way to go. Last Saturday we nursed the car about thirty miles on back roads to a "Wings and Wheels" fly in. Dempsy drove the TR and I followed chase in the Ford pick up. We had a great time. Saw two B-25 Mitchells, a Corsair, a T-28, T-6's and many others. And so many beautiful cars. You know. You've been to car shows. If you saw any one of the cars in a grocery store parking lot you'd be blown away. But when there are 200 of them you barely have time to give them a look. I coveted a beautiful cream white Studebaker Avanti parked along side it's show mate, a cherry Hawk. There were 60's convertables, Corvairs, which my mechanic and I both like. Antiques like Model A's and T's, rat cars, etc. you know. But there was my little Triumph on the front line by the planes. Yes it was a rat. No top. Primer patches, bondo patches, no carpet, every single thing on it needing some kind of attention. Yet as I sat in my lawn chair by my car as if I had an immaculate 1957 T-Bird, I talked to passers by who said things like "Oh yes, I know exactly what this is. There was only one at my High School. I love these" My car was a hit. And we had fun because we knew some of the aviation folks too. I owe it all to you Dempsey. Thank you.
LLITTY :::::+:::::
I am not a motor head. In one of my blogs I have a post about what a really bad mechanic I am. I have seven cars. One not running. One in California. I have two cars visiting that are not mine. In the last week or so, I have had three cars break down and wind up in various shops. Friday I picked up one of the cars from the shop. I drove it sixty miles and it broke down again. It is back in the shop. That was the second time in two weeks that I had two breakdowns in one day. I can't complain. There was a long period where all six cars just did their job. I'm bad about maintenance. I take them to Jiffy Lube, but that's it.
A while back, after our fly-in, a good buddy of mine made me an offer. This unnamed buddy, let's just call him Dempsey, had an idea. He suggested I let him base and store and work on his little sports car in my shed and he in return would work on my "Brittish piece of sh-t". Well, I have never been able to afford a mechanic to work on a hobby car. So I took him up on it. My little Brittish car is called a TR-6 and it was way not running. It could not even move with it's rusted brakes locked. It had not been driven in about 13 years. I have had it eight years and kept it high and dry in my shed and in 2003 I had patched the floorboards so it would not be like a "Fred Flintstone" car. Our first day of working on the thing was just getting the bees nests out of it and making sure the snakes would not come back. About three weeks after our "deal" I found myself driving the crazy little thing down the runway at 50 mph with no brakes. Fueled by a soda bottle full of 100LL aviation gas run through brand new fuel lines into a new fuel pump into the unknown carburators. We had robbed a battery out of my jeep. I was amazed the starter and the clutch and for that matter the engine itself, mostly worked. It was a long way to come from a "dead" car. After that drive I was happy and telling Dempsey he was a "genius" and a "wizard". And he was and is. But there is a long long way to go. Last Saturday we nursed the car about thirty miles on back roads to a "Wings and Wheels" fly in. Dempsy drove the TR and I followed chase in the Ford pick up. We had a great time. Saw two B-25 Mitchells, a Corsair, a T-28, T-6's and many others. And so many beautiful cars. You know. You've been to car shows. If you saw any one of the cars in a grocery store parking lot you'd be blown away. But when there are 200 of them you barely have time to give them a look. I coveted a beautiful cream white Studebaker Avanti parked along side it's show mate, a cherry Hawk. There were 60's convertables, Corvairs, which my mechanic and I both like. Antiques like Model A's and T's, rat cars, etc. you know. But there was my little Triumph on the front line by the planes. Yes it was a rat. No top. Primer patches, bondo patches, no carpet, every single thing on it needing some kind of attention. Yet as I sat in my lawn chair by my car as if I had an immaculate 1957 T-Bird, I talked to passers by who said things like "Oh yes, I know exactly what this is. There was only one at my High School. I love these" My car was a hit. And we had fun because we knew some of the aviation folks too. I owe it all to you Dempsey. Thank you.
LLITTY :::::+:::::
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
