Category: United States

January 14th – February 7th, 2008

Wine tasting at Temecula wineries, evenings on the back patio by the chimenea with a wood fire, Mexican meals in great restaurants, long days at the computer doing research and finalizing our database, warm mornings enjoying the sun and good food on the patio, and long days sorting and cataloguing fuses and creating inventory worksheets – all this has kept us quite busy for the last few weeks. It’s just astonishing how much time has gone by, as we seem to have very little “down” time.

Food

Good food continues to be a key ingredient here – we have been treated to a wide variety of Mexican food; we’ve bought fresh ingredients and cooked and barbecued at home; we had one amazing evening at a restaurant called Shogun, where everything is cooked on a long grill right in front of the customers.
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January 11th – 14th, 2008

Just wanted to post a quick update. We’re still in Mission Viejo, being treated like royalty by Dave. We still have our own bathroom and bedroom, and Dave has made sure we are eating really well every day. We’ve had some awesome meals, both eating out, take-out, and cooking here at the house. He has a charming 2/2 with a loft, a formal dining room, a living room, a big kitchen, and a delightful small back yard. Dave’s got two cats who keep us company while he is at work – Oscar and Felix. Felix has kidney disease, and was given 6 months to live about 2 years ago. He needs all kinds of special treatment, but it hasn’t affected his sweet and affectionate personality at all.

Dave took us out on Lake Mission Viejo one afternoon on a pontoon boat, at sunset. We were only out for an hour, but it was so perfect I couldn’t believe it. It was peaceful and beautiful and gave us a great break – and we love water of nearly any kind!
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January 7th – 10th, 2008

Leaving Redondo Beach was very cold, and very windy – with gusts up to 25 mph, but we were setting out for Laguna Beach no matter what. Determination can do wonderful things to the spirit! Facing what was going to be one of our longer mileage days of the trip, and fortified by an Ultimate Meal smoothie from Steve, we headed out on the road about 9:45. We had a somewhat hilly section in getting through Palos Verdes, but we expected the rest of the day to be essentially flat. Ah well, ignorance is bliss sometimes.

Getting used to the bikes

One of the biggest things facing us is our inexperience in riding these bikes – and there are really significant differences. For starters, it’s a whole lot different in the number of pedal strokes required in getting a distance on 26” wheels than on 700c wheels. Another is the difference in the gearing. What used to be a short click from one level to the next now produces a whole new result. I no longer have an instinctive feel for what gear to be in as I head up a hill. In addition, we no longer have the reach forward to click the gears and hit the brakes with index and middle fingers, but rather we now sit up straighter and have a little wrist action thing going on as we twist a bar (grip shifters) to get to the gear we want.
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January 5th – 6th, 2008

Farmer’s Market

So what is a Hachiya persimmon, we asked? It’s much softer than regular persimmons, we heard. It’s very rich in flavor, and delicious. It must be eaten soft. If it’s eaten hard, it’s like stuffing your mouth with cotton and sucking on a lemon – it just dries the mouth right up. To eat it soft, take the persimmon, pinch off the top, and suck the contents right out, said the vendor as he handed me a moist paper towel and a soft Hachiya persimmon.

And so went the adventures during our morning at the Farmer’s Market in Torrance CA. Sparsely attended because of the big storms hitting the area, it was nonetheless a complete treat in terms of diversity, food and education. We ate pupusas from an El Salvadorian booth – a sort of pancake filled with chicken, beef or pork, vegetables or cheese, or everything. We drank a limonada (lemonade) from the El Salvadorian booth – it had all natural juices, along with whole grapes and pieces of mango. We saw Peruvian food; a variety of Asian foods; Hawaiian donuts; tamales; and a Hawaiian/Samoan barbeque booth.
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January 2 to January 4, 2008

Getting out of town

What a wild day we had the day we left Leo Carrillo! We woke up early and started in right away with our packing up and organizing, but despite our steady movement forward, it still took nearly four hours before we were ready to leave. We said good-bye to Gil, and then Warren showed up again ready to reclaim his favorite spot. We exchanged good-byes with him, and he did a short prayer for us. We finally rolled out of the campground at 10:45 a.m. with a 44-mile ride ahead of us.

The biggest downside to our start from the campground is the fact that the first thing we hit leaving camp each time is a long stiff uphill. Here we were after not having ridden these bikes ever with the trailers, and in my case, having only ridden the new bike about 3 blocks. Chelsea had a total of about 40 miles advantage on me, riding her Safari, but those were “unloaded” miles. And, we haven’t done any significant riding in over 4 months. All that led to a distinct lack of confidence that we’d really make the 44 miles in one day, and that we’d really be able to ride all those hills without walking any of them.
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The winds are gusting to 45 mph, the clouds are coming in, and I have about a half hour before the sun goes down behind the Malibu cliffs. I am ensconced on the concrete floor in front of the public bathroom, with the cords to the laptop and cell phone on an extension cord running into the bathroom. We need to charge everything, and we used up the battery for the laptop in the tent this morning by loading the photos for the last two albums and doing the sorting and organizing. Chelsea has just finished putting the computer onto my new Novara Safari, and is headed in to take a shower – I just finished mine (two quarters gives enough time for a very efficient hair and body wash, and not much else).

It’s hard to believe, but we’ve been here 8 days now, and we’re all set to move on tomorrow. We’ll head out along Pacific Coast Highway, through Santa Monica and Venice, to Redondo Beach, where we’ve been told we can camp at a city park for $5 a night per person. After that, we’re hoping to hit Laguna Beach, and stay with Dave Roper, then on to Oceanside where Paul offered another place to stay. We may stay two days at each of these places (if they’ll have us) because we really need to finish all the last minute things here in the US, like canceling part of our Verizon contract, getting powers of attorney to the right people, shipping home any final things we know we don’t need, making sure Alex’s name is on all the utilities back in FL, and so on. We’re leaving it open as to when we enter Mexico, but we want to be sure that we are really ready to go, and that all our ducks are in a row.
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December 21st to December 24th, 2006

A gorgeous California sunset, a glass of white zinfandel (ok, it was a plastic REI cup), some chocolate chip oatmeal cookies, and a campsite right on the beach, tucked away behind a sand dune – does it get any better than this? Great Internet and cell phone signal, shops just a few blocks away – ahhh…what a great kick start to the next phase of our trip. Kathy and Gary and Kevin dropped us off at the beach near sunset, after a quick stop for supplies at Trader Joes in Santa Barbara. We quickly set up camp, dragged a tarp out to the beach and ate a still-warm baked potato we’d brought from the Whalen’s, with the cookies as dessert, and finished off with the wine. We were quite cold and this was our first night out camping in a while, so we crawled into bed and were asleep by 9 p.m.

True to life on the road, we were awakened out of a sound sleep at 11 p.m. by something getting into our things. Sure enough, it was a raccoon, and a feisty one at that. We climbed out of the tent and went after it, but we were totally disheartened, as we still don’t have our bear canisters, and we really had no way to protect our food from a determined raccoon. We were doing what pathetically little we could, when our new next-door neighbor, just setting up his tent (at 11 p.m.!) asked if we needed help. We explained our dilemma and he immediately offered to put our food in his car for the night. We agreed on the spot.
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November 22nd – December 21st, 2007

Gotta love friends like this…

We’ve been friends with Kathy and Gary and Kevin since Kathy and I met while we were enrolling our kids in kindergarten – her Kevin and my Alex. They are now 20, so that’s been a lot of years. They are such good friends that we have survived international moves, cross country moves, and many more life issues. It’s the kind of feeling that, while we may not talk to each for weeks or months, when we do pick up the phone to talk, it’s as though no time has gone by at all.

The family is undergoing its own major adjustment right now – they have just moved back to Santa Ynez after more than 6 years up in Oakhurst, near Yosemite. We dropped in on them while they are in the midst of boxes everywhere, carpet installers that don’t call to install the carpet, trying to shop for furniture so boxes can be unloaded and items put away, and all this with us suddenly here, and Christmas underway. From our perspective, it’s been seriously great to see how the house is coming together, and it’s particularly special, as we know we won’t be seeing them for 4 years or more. Now we at least have a mental picture of how their lives are, while we are so far away.
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November 17th – November 22nd, 2007

My sister Maureen and her husband Fred were gracious enough to visit with friends in Santa Monica so that they would be able to pick us up at LAX (Los Angeles airport) on Saturday. Everything went really smoothly, except for a bit of traffic for them on getting to the airport, and we were in Santa Barbara by dinnertime. We were so exhausted after our rockin’ and rollin’ in Seattle that we spent a lot of time sleeping and sitting around quietly. Maureen got us out almost each day walking on the beach – Fred and Maureen are only a 20-minute walk from the bluffs overlooking the beach. That was heaven.

We also put our bikes up for sale on Craig’s list, and that was a huge step forward. Fred was kind enough to loan me the temporary use of his guitar, so I got to practice some chords, and managed to pick up about 4 chords in only a few days. In case I haven’t mentioned it yet, I am going to get a guitar to bring along on our trip, and I plan on being pretty proficient by the time we return. Anyone have a decent guitar that he/she would donate to the cause?
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