I Remember California
Day 9
I had breakfast with my folks, they were heading north to Oregon to finish their vacation. On the other hand, I was heading south. I said my goodbyes to everyone and got on the 101. For the rest of the trip, let's just assume I felt drained by this trip. For some reason, this trip just felt especially grueling. I did get to go through all the CD's I had bought along the trip. Just before I hit Gilroy I ended up hitting "Suzie Lightning" on Mr. Bad Example. I needed to stop, and the Garlic Store seemed like a reasonable place, though upon reflection it was a little too "Hickory Farms with extra Garlic."

About a hour later, I hit Salinas, and decided I should stop at the National Steinbeck Center. If you've got an hour in that area, I do recommend it. It offers some nice insights on Steinbeck's work, and if you've ever had a Travels with Charlie bonus, it's nice to see the vehicle that inspired it.

The other side of the museum is devoted to the valley's agriculture, and well, it's...interesting. I got to learn about the cigarette substitute made out of lettuce, saw this frightening image of a 15-foot tall Marilyn Monroe maniacally laughing as she is about to crush you with her giant artichoke minions, and this station where one can vote for the president of vegetables, and I discovered that a Muppet artichoke bears a scary resemblance to Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, except the artichoke talks like a Kennedy. There's also a gift shop with lots of quality quotes from Steinbeck (two that I liked are included here.) Additionally, I found this children's book which frankly begs to be a series. (Your assignment: come up with equally ridiculous sequels.)

After there, I running a bit behind schedule, since I was aiming to hit LA by 6pm. I stopped only two more times, one a Carl's Jr. (trying out another chain), and for gas. I really didn't dig Carl's Jr., but I think I was coming down with something, so I won't blame them. I contemplated the double six dollar burger, but I realized I wasn't going to be up to it. I did, however, formulate the joke that should be written for standup about this.
"So I went to Carl's Jr. and I saw this Double Six Dollar Burger, they're advertising it as a pound of meat on a bun. Now I don't know about you, but I can't eat that. So I asked the guy, 'Who buys this? Why do you have this on the menu?' The guy says, 'we got a plan, we're going to keep selling it until we kill all the cows, or we kill all the people eating the cows.' So I said, 'Isn't that a little cynical?' and he said, 'well, we're running a pool in the back.' So I took the burger....and the points."

A long drive through nothingness will drive me a little nuts, as will knowing exactly when flights to Amsterdam leave. So by the time I got to LA and found Joe's apartment, I was basically out of it. We stopped off at a Pho2000 for dinner, covering my need for food I can't usually get in PA, and giving us another option for the Milan Plan. Perfectly natural for a company to have franchises in Vietnam and Milan. I don't know why more haven't done it.

Lacking a plan, or really anything else I needed to see, we just crashed in and went through Badder Santa on DVD. That's some good stuff. After everyone else had collapsed for the evening, I started flipping through channels. I ended up finding three things I couldn't get at home.
1. Spanish language coverage of the WNBA.
2. Dr. Gene Scott. Back in the day when my folks had the satellite, Dr. Gene was the most baffling thing on airwaves. One channel was nothing but 24 hours of Dr. Gene Scott sitting alone on a chair on stage, discussing some strain of theology, without commercials, without a break, without anything. It had all the appearance of a man trapped there talking forever. It was surreal. One of my favorite Robin Williams jokes was him describing Dr. Gene Scott, perfectly capturing his slow drawl, "Today we will com-pare Jesus and Spiderman". I swear that joke was written just for me.
3. Korean Home Shopping Network, selling breast enhancements. It was like bad spam email come to life.


Day 10
Rising late, we ended up driving to some place called the Astro Diner. We got a decent pair of omeletes, though this continued my whole curiosity with the avocado. I figured I needed to have one out there, since that seems to be the place where it's considered useful, but once again, I found it indistinguishable from Crisco with food coloring. I can only figure that the California Avocado Growers Board has an iron fist of control New York's five families would envy.

After the meal, we went to the Dodger game. It was also the Angels game, so I killed two birds with one ticket. It was a decent game, 10-5 Dodgers, Bartolo Colon imploded, and I got a Dodger dog. I hate to tell them that Milwaukee truly has them outdistanced, though I had a bratwurst there. I should have gone into Vincent Vega mode. "It's a good dog, it's not a five dollar dog, but it's a good dog." We also played the game of "what's the worst player whose uniform is available to buy?" I think we had a winner in Darren Dreifort. We joked "Proceeds from the sale of Darren Dreifort merchandise go to benefit paying off his contract."

After the game we drove over to the Masons, and then hailed my cousin Jason. Jason's a cool guy, he's ended up doing more with technology than I ever will. If you're using Blogrolling, you're using his stuff. My dad can be proud, between helping out Ryan and Jason get involved with computers, he's been a major seed donor to technology. S'anyway, we ended up going out for Thai, then ended up meeting at the Comedy Store. It was potpourri night, or something. Whichever comedians showed up got on. Our goal was to catch Dave Taylor. Dave played for CMU back in the day, and headed west to do standup. This makes him one of two former quiz bowlers to do standup. You wouldn't think that would be a viable option, but then again, I've seen people escape quiz bowl via Magic the Gathering and poker, so you know, that's not all that unexpected. Dave was pretty good, and subsequent comedians merely improved his act by being so bad. By far the high point for me had to be me accidentally jamming the MC's circuits before we left.

Him: "Yeah, just look at this guy from Oregon here!" (looks closer at the O hat,) "Wait that's not Oregon, where is that?"
DEK: "Omaha."
Him: "You from Omaha?" (Struggling for Nebraska based humor)
DEK: "No. Pittsburgh."
Him: "Oh." [turns away, realizing the Pittsburgh vein had been mined by Taylor earlier.]

Day 11
It was my last day in California, and having done almost everything I wanted to do in the state, I figured there was little need to rush. Joe had taken the day off from work (he had worked the Saturday, Day 9). I UPS'ed most of my new stuff out, caught a picture of the Thai Town Hot Dog and then we drove over to Burbank. We decided to put the In-n-Out Burger knowledge to good use, and I ordered up some animal fries. Cheese, grilled onions and sauce on the fries. As you can see here, it's California poutine.

We then ended up at a used bookstore, I don't know what went wrong then. I had a little gastrointestinal trouble, then I had some sort of claustrophobic attack. I don't know. I'd never had that happen before, but maybe it was my sinuses. Like I said before, I was having trouble the day before at Carl's Jr., and now maybe it was coming back to roost.

After the bookstore, we decided the remaining essential California thing to see was the Galleria, (the original). Frankly, there's not much to recommend it now, since it's been rebuilt, it's now basically built to be a place to eat and nothing else. We took the opportunity there to see Saved!, which is one of those movies that I have to figure is set up to fail. The problem I had with it was that it was aiming to create a balanced portrayal on all sides. Well, doing that in my mind kills the effect of farce, which is what it was aiming for. I wasn't expecting it to be a nasty skewering of one side, which is what some reviews seemed to be hoping for, I just knew that it had picked a subject too complex for one film to resolve neatly. Such is the problem with trying to be in the middle, I know that a little too well.

After that, we just ended up getting dinner. I had to be up at 4:30 for the flight, and I needed to get some sleep.

Day 12
In the entire trip, I hadn't been rushed once, but a catastrophic slip-up was due. I found that out the hard way, as I couldn't find the car I rented. I had paranoia going through my system big time, as I spent 20 minutes dragging all my luggage around before sunrise, desperately trying to figure out where the car was. Finally, I remembered it was straight-right, rather than two turns, and I piled in. The next problem was turning in the car, by the time I got to the airport, I found that the map to the car rental place was complete bull. Then when I found the billboard for the rental place, it didn't indicate the right street (well, it did indicate the right street, but it didn't indicate there was a block where that street didn't exist.) I finally dropped the car off at 6, for a 7am flight. (Start calling fraught now.) 6:10 they dropped me off, and I realized that the line was insane. I got to the head of the line at 6:21, but 6:20 was the cutoff for my luggage, so they bumped me. Now I was starting to get really ticked off. My sinuses were acting up, I was overstressed from car deal, and I had discovered I had left my CD in the car. Then when I got moved into the security line, somebody dropped their luggage on my foot. This was only compounded when they moved me to another security line, and I tripped over my own luggage, twisting my ankle. Then they shuffled me back into the original security line, again for no apparent reason. Finally, I managed to hop up to the line, drop my bags off, and hobble over to security. All through this, I start cursing under my breath, a constant stream of expletives, punctuated by "hmm, Peter Strauss." Yes, on my way out of the city, I finally had a random celebrity sighting. The expletive stream continued. They were shuffling us off to the international terminal to get through security. (Figure the logic of this. 23 people processed, requiring four security people, two bus drivers, and two separate buses. This can't be an effective method, over simply going through the line.)

So instead of a quick escape from the city, I was stuck for another three hours, and I had no interest in being there. My head really had gone off the scale, and with my Tylenol in the checked luggage, I was facing a long trip. It only got worse when I realized the new flight wasn't a breakfast flight, and then got further worse when I realized my lack of layover in Chicago wouldn't allow me time to eat. So upon landing in Pittsburgh, my day was burnt, my hunger was extreme, and my head wouldn't stop pounding.

So that's it. My big vacation. I thank everyone who I met along the way, and those of you who slogged through this.