MerlintheMad
10000 Posts Club!
The family decided that Disneyland was on next week. They're driving down variously today; some staying in Mesquite tonight, some in Vegas, some making it actually to Anaheim. The weekend is for getting settled and contacting local family; and Monday is "family day", whatever that is supposed to entail; I'll be told, I'm sure.
I am not going into Disneyland. But I drove my wife's vegan food down here; three ice chests of it. It fits! Amazing. She flies. I met her at John Wayne Airport. And while she was deplaning I dusted off my car. It was very dusty. There were bugs in front too. It got up to 91F on the freeway, if you can believe it. The 1st of February, and 91F on the freeway!? The psi in my tires was up to 48. I did not come down here to "enjoy" temperatures in the 80s, much less 90s; I came down here to enjoy temperatures in the 60s. Away from the freeway it was still 73F. I won't complain about that.
We're staying in Huntington Beach at the Surf City Inn. It's quaint. So quaint, in fact, that it is all built over a ground level garage with two stories of rooms on the second and third floor. And (get this) NO elevator!? I'm not kidding. This place is for kids. Not Baby Boomers whose wives are vegan and require literally hundreds of pounds of stuff when they go on trips. I nearly died going up 36 flights of stairs (if I was in a Hitchcock film, those last three steps would have done me in). First trip up was with an ice chest; ditto the second; ditto the third (a fairly light one, though, being smaller than the other two). Then came the suitcase. The monster. If it weighed 50 lbs I am a wet nosed kid. I dragged it up, one stair at a time. Or I would not be writing this. Heh.
Row One: I managed to get all three ice chests into the hatch with room to spare for my car cleaning supplies; Dawn lightens the sky over the Wasatch Range above Provo; the Virgin River gorge, my favorite part (but "they" ruined it by posting 55 MPH speed limits, and having road construction going on; I even saw a cop pull over a speeder; I've NEVER seen a cop in that canyon before); a typical view of southern Nevada-NW Arizona.
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Row Two: "Black Mountain", east of Barstow, at least that's my name for it; and a close up of Black Mountain, the freeway cuts north of it; NAV waiting in the "cellphone waiting lot", waiting for my wife to say that she's on the ground and forty minutes out (occupied the time dusting my car); I picked up my wife at the passenger pickup, and she added three suitcases of various sizes (the smallest one is on her lap).
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Row Three: I managed to cram everything in; the first view of Surf City Inn, from the middle turn lane; I backed into a precious end stall; and it was a very tight squeeze (I worked my way in by doing ten point turns, JK, but only a little)
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Row Four: closeup detail of the wall at the entrance to the parking garage (which I did not use, deeming it too cramped and dangerous, and opting for outside instead); pull back and show the wider view; the 36 stairs from hell.
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(edit to add: I forgot to mention, that on the way down, the freeways were hazardous with junk lying around; actually, mostly in LA area, including Riverside, where I saw an entire front bumper cover still lying off to the left shoulder. WTH!? The worst was an aftermarket exhaust pipe, easily 40" long, still all chrome looking and new, lying/straddling the lane line, threating traffic in both lanes. Earlier, traffic ahead was slowing, where you come down in that giant "S" bend below Victorville on I-15: and when it was my turn to arrive at the panic spot, I saw what looked to be large pieces of aluminum lying all over the road. So far, so good. But sometime after the aluminum and before the exhaust pipe, I heard a *whack* somewhere up front. Not until I was dusting my LF wheel in the cellphone waiting lot, did I see the impact mark to the extreme edge of the rim, which had lifted the powder coat into a little "spike", which I picked off with my fingernail. The last thing I did before driving around to fetch my wife was get out the gloss black touchup and go along the c. 2" of abused area. Looks pretty good, so much so that a picture would not show anything, so, I didn't bother, and even forgot about it until much later; or earlier, depending on how you look at it, since it was only this morning that I remembered!

