Friday, August 31, 2007

Which Way LA

Mike here. Sara, Sasha and myself have been in LA since last week. We're staying with her granparents, who are feeding us, lending us a Chrysler, letting us do pretty much anything we want, and generally taking extremely good care of us.




Friday: fly down after work.





Saturday:



Go look for a surfboard rental for the week. Turns out renting a board for a week (we're here for 10 days) runs about $230. Yikes. I step into the surfshop next to the rental shop just to poke around before kicking down the dough. Lo, there in the used pile is a slightly dinged but beautiful, 9'3 high-performance tri-fin noserider. Price tag? $195. Sara and I quickly consult the options: how to get it home? Incidental costs with the airline? Leash? Wax? What if it snaps? We bite the bullet and buy it. SCORE! SUPER SCORE! NEW BOARD!



Go looking for surf. We wind up at Sunset. It's the wrong tide, and the waves are inconsistent. But it's warm, I have a new board, and Sasha and Sara are down for beach time. First wave paddled for on the new ride was made. Always a good luck sign. Dolphins in the lineup are also good luck!


Several stand-up paddleboarders were out. This was new to me. These folks look literally like they're walking on water. It's the new/old thing to do, I guess.


(Doesn't Sasha look like Tom Waits here?)



I think we did something else that day, too. Don't remember.


Sara's step-aunts Suzanne and Stacy swing by. Man, they're cool. Seriously. Dinner together was fun.


Sunday:

Wake up at 4:30 (by accident, I was aiming for 5:30) and scoot down to the beach. Surf Rose Ave at first light. First one in the water. Waves are micro beach breaks, but it was still fun.


We drive to Seal Beach with Sara's mom to visit Sara's biological grandmother. She lives at Leisure World, has a thing for TV, and has lots of paintings of dark, stormy waves. I split early to go surf the San Gabriel Rivermouth. The Stormrider guide says that stepping on stingrays and/or sandsharks is a threath. Yikes. I wear booties. Fun, windy, closed out. More standup paddleboarders.



I return to Leisure World to find everbody watching TV. Judy decides to do a grocery run; comes back 1 1/2 hours later. We all watch local news and network TV.

Monday:


We had planned, as a micro-getaway, to go up to Ventura for a couple of days. The drive up included lots of surfchecks. (By the way, Matt Brunner is our surf-advice-contest winner. details later.)

Folks said, "Oh, you got to check out:
"Leo Carillo
"Zuma
"Topanga
"Malibu
"County Line
"California Street/C-street..."
etc

...and we did. We settled on Zuma, which was on the way up. Surfed for an hour or more on my own peak. Closeouts and beachbreak, but it was warm and clear. I think my shorts chaffed all the scruff off the inside of my thighs.

We found a cheap room (at the Vagabond, which was surprisingly vagabond-free) two minutes' walk from downtown and 15 minutes' walk from the surf spot.

Walked around downtown for a bit. Sasha was in a semi-meltdown by dinnertime. I surfed until dark at this spot called California Street/C-Street/Ventura Point/Surfers Point that Matt Brunner suggested. I think he's from Ventura originally, and damn, that was great advice. A mega-long soft right-hand pointbreak. It's the wave on the cover of the North American Stormrider guide, for all you nerds. NERDS! Caught tons of long waves until the full moon was overhead.


Tuesday:


Dawn-patrolled at that same spot. I was in the water by 5:45, well before sunrise, and there were already five people in the water. The third was I caught was the best of the day, except that it knocked my contact out. DAMN! First time ever that's happened to me. Huffed it back to the room for a replacement. 35 minutes later the lineup was full, the sunrise happened, but I still caught some good waves.


We roamed Ventura on foot for the rest of the morning and early afternoon. What a cool town!



Their homeless are a lot like Arcata's homeless: lost, but with feeling. Sara cruised the bountiful thrift shops (my favorite, and I'm not making this up: "The Retarded Children's Thrift Store") and scored bargains a-plenty. The park with the old cannons was nice.






Wednesday:


Sara decides she wants to surf. This request is limited to warm-water, shark-free conditions, so I jump on it. We drive to Malibu in the morning to catch the low tide. We put her on the board and start walking her out into the less-crowded side of the lineup. She gets on the board and I start pushing her toward the wave. For reasons determined later (critters, colder water, rocks, fright), she has a change of heart. So be it. Did I fight? No. I surfed. That's right. I surfed Malibu. Poorly, but I still did it.



That night Wilco was at the open-air Greek theatre. Sold out show in the LA hills, warm and beautiful. I'd never seen a show there, so it was nice to finally experience this venue.



During the show, we get several voicemails indicating that something at home went wrong, is that ok, but don't worrry about it, nevermind, the situation is resolved and all is well. We get involved at the "all is well" point in the situation, so it never happened as far as we don't know.



Wilco play "California Stars" as part of their massive encore.


Thursday:





Disneyland and California Adventure.









Disneyland. It's been too long. Now it will be too long again.

We managed to go to OC during the peak of the SoCal heatwave, which really made life difficult. But we did all the major rides, and still had time for that new park across the parking lot from Disneyland called California Adventure.


An employee told us about drugs and Disneyland. First of all, there actually IS a chamber with Mickey Mouse wallpaper where they let people who took too much acid (or whatever) come down. Secondly, there are at least two big drug days at Disneyland each year: Raver Day and Bat day.

Bat Day is the Goth day at Disneyland. Apparently at 7:00 pm on Bat Day the place to be is on at the Haunted House. When the room starts to descend, the ride host basically says, instead of the normal Haunted House schpeel, "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome home!" Everybody whoops loudly. So loudly, this person said, that earplugs would be helpful.

Raver Day seems to be more of a general psychedelic day. "Their favorite ride is the Winnie the Pooh ride, because it's so trippy already." Not having been on that ride, we didn't really believe it. Believe it.

The drag about the end of the day was that we missed a crucial voicemail from the Grampies saying that not only was Sasha not good, but she was crying all day, not sleeping, not eating, and not drinking. It took us over an hour to get to Disneyland, but only 40 minutes to race back.



Friday:


Dawn patrol at Malibu. It's crazy crowded, and I got dropped in on a bunch. But for a non-local, I wasn't really disrepected. Or noticed (I hope).



Shopping at H+M at Beverly center, and first access to the internet(s) all week. Oh, internet.
Off to California Pizza Kitchen to solidify our California-ness.

This whole time, I should add, we've been watching the US Open on a 60-inch Hi-def screen. Kick ASS!


Saturday:



Still super-hot. This whole vacation we haven't really "slept in"; today's no different. I drive up PCH looking for surf. PCH is bumper-to-bummer because, apparently, two cops hit eachother at Topanga and PCH. So, instead of Topanga for the morning, it was Sunset again. Which sucked. 300 people in the water, I surf for an hour and get 3 waves.



Sara's grandfather is intent on teaching us how stock markets work, and has been for years. Today he sat us down for an hour going over various finance-management websites. We got little out of it.

It's at this point that we realize it's nice here, but home is starting to sound pretty good. Don't we have a dog still? What's he up to?

Sunday: 3rd Street Promenade after surfing Bay Street. Not a single celebrity sighting.

Monday: Fly Home. Surf Bunkers.