California Dreaming.......

The last day and night in the Bay area was spent well. In the daytime Luke, Heidi, and I went to an indoor rock climbing gym and they gave me a quick tutorial on mechanics of it before throwing me up on the slab. Once gotten the hang of, rock climbing was a lot of fun and great exercise (which had become increasingly absent from the trip). That evening we ventured into downtown SF to meet up with KC friends Bill Stack, Adam Balentine, Rosemary Wiedemann, and Whitney Arthur. The night comprised mostly of playing a pretty entertaining dice game in the middle of some dive bar and Whitney hustling bar patrons at a Pop-A-Shot game. It was good to see the KC crew still hits it hard, even when removed from our beloved hometown.
The next morning I secured a ride to LA from Craiglist ridshare and spent the morning hanging with Luke and Heidi prior to my noontime departure. This included walking into an Oakland bakery for a pastry and being surprised that there was a 4 piece band playing right in the middle of the people eating Danishes and reading the paper—the Bay area never ceases to amaze me.
My ride to LA was Evan from Napa Valley, who was heading to see friends at UCLA and Shirley, a fellow ridesharer who was a Loyola Marymount student heading back from winter break. The ride went well (ok, almost--more on that later) and for all the dissenters who have expressed the opinion that my ridesharing is going to make me end up dead in a ditch—I pose the question: Do you ever get into a taxi? If so, you know no more than I do about the person driving you and actually that taxi driver could easily be untraceable unlike the email/phone exchanging used in ridesharing. I’ll take my odds with ridesharing and as a great philosopher (or maybe it was my Uncle Joe Schloegel) once said, “it was better to have gambled and lost than not to have gambled at all.” Interestingly enough all occupants in the car were products of Jesuit education. Anyways, I digress, back to why the trip went almost smoothly. Approximately 1 hour outside of LA we were in the Grapevine (mountainous area before LA) and Evan’s 2000-era Jeep Grand Cherokee started to do “funny things” (that is how mechanically illiterate individuals like myself describe car problems). We pulled over in some podunk area and accessed the situation, which could be summed up as three people staring a car engine and shaking their heads disapprovingly. Eventually we wandered over to the town auto garage and the on-duty mechanic “Red”, who easily could have just stepped out of a movie about 3 strangers getting murdered in a small town, informed us in colloquial mechanic language that the Jeep needed to “fart” (translation: our exhaust was clogged and didn’t have the proper airflow). He also stated that technically he could not fix it as the procedure, if not done at a designated site, was a huge federal EPA fine (translation: he would do it for $20 and a case of Busch Light). About this same time another similarly stranded woman informed us that there was a “winter blast” heading straight towards the Grapevine and that they were expected 8 inches of snow fast. “Just freaking great” I muttered and made a heartfelt confession to Shirley that I must be the doomsday talisman traveling the country as there had been a road-closing storm in Colorado, a city-crippling wind and rain storm in San Fran, and now a “winter blast” wherever we were and they all had occurred upon my entrance to the areas. In light of our impeding stranding in BFE, California, we decided to take our chances with a mechanically unsound vehicle and get the hell out of Dodge. And so, by the luck of the rabbit’s foot, we made it safely to or respective destinations. Which for me is cousins Dave and Tiffany’s place in Redondo Beach, CA. (by the way, we watched the night news which showed the highway patrol shutting down the snowy Grapevine highway—disaster diverted again). More on LA later……… for now here is Luke and Heidi singing me a farewell song...