Just arrived in from the coast...

Just got back yesterday from a week's vacation in California. Had a great time. It was a very nice mix of travel and chill. Stayed at my sister's place, just off the strand in Hermosa Beach. (See another Strand cam here. We ate breakfast at this restaurant before I caught my flight out.)

We travelled down to Mexico, a beautiful drive down the west coast of the Baja peninsula to Ensenada, a lovely port city roughly an hour south of Tijuana (yes, on "The Road To Ensenada"). About a 5-hour trip from LA.

Visited world-famous Hussongs Cantina, "Birthplace of the Margarita". Stopped briefly in Rosarito on the way back, and that evening we stayed at the home of my sister's friends in San Diego, on Coronado Island, where there are a few military bases.

Later in the week, we drove to Las Vegas for a quick overnight visit. It's about a 4-hour drive from LA. I had never been to Sin City and had never been in a desert before either. Both were worth seeing for completely different reasons. Saw aliens. Saw Elvis. More on that later.

The rest of the time I explored around the South Bay areaóHermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beachóenjoying time by the ocean, at the piers and on the plazas. Temperatures were in the low-70s during the day, a little chillier at night. Jacket weather, but still nice. There's a wonderful small-town, beach community vibe down there. A couple of times while I was walking around, strangers on the sidewalk actually said "hi" to me. I love it there. It's the kind of place where people sit on their patios or rooftops, pour themselves a margarita (invented in Hussongs, don't you know) and watch the sun set over the pacific.

Welcomed back with a nasty snow storm last night. Was driving back from the airport with my friend Derek, the Air Canada pilot (he and his wife Sheri were in town, and his flight got in at the same time as mine, so we arranged to drive in from the airport together. He keeps a car there for lay-overs). We started driving down the 427. Saw 2 or 3 accidents along the way, and then the SUV directly in front of us started swerving, spun completely around and started sliding for the guardrail. It hit the guardrail pretty hard and then started rebounding back towards us! Derek managed to maneuver around it and kept us out of harm's way. It pays to drive with a pilot.

I wanted back on the plane. It was safer.

I'll post some pictures when I get them developed, but for now here are a few snapshots in words:

Welcome to Mexico: We had barely left Ensenada, when we found ourselves in a roadblock "manned" by a squad of federales, dressed in green army uniforms and toting M-16s. I say "manned" in quotation marks, because none of them looked older than 16. One of them had a screwdriver and he was poking through the empty trunk of the car stopped in front of us. Our turn came and they asked my sister to get out and open her trunk. It was packed to the brim with stuff, not contraband, just stuff she keeps in there. The first soldier calls another guy over to come have a look, gesturing toward the fully laden cargo hold as if to say "look at all this junk." The second armed teenager raises his eyebrows, looks at my sister as if to say "how can you keep so much stuff in your trunk?", and waves us on our way.

Definition of surreal: Driving across the Mojave desert on American Thanksgiving Day listening to "The countdown of the top 40 Christmas songs of all time" on one of the few available radio stations! "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas..." Uh, maybe somewhere, Bing, but not here.

"It never rains in Southern California...": ...but on my last night there, Friday night, it poured. Man, it poured. Quite an event I'm told. I asked my sister, who's lived there for 30 years, when was the last time it rained like that, and she couldn't remember. The late-í80s possibly. It was on all the newscasts. Weird.

And now, it's back to Normal. But I feel a bit more refreshed and rested. And only three weeks before I go home for xmas!