California Dreaming

The worst thing about a great vacation is coming back to a boring job. When you are a kid you are constantly in 'vacation mode', at least I was. Perhaps that's why I took so long to do something with my life...and I'm still not sure that what I've done is the right thing.

As a kid you were constantly anticipating the next vacation period. Be it a weekend, long weekend, a weeks vacation, a snow day, or of course the seemingly endless summer. It always ended quite soon, but every year it seemed the same, when you got to summer break, it would last forever. Instead of the boring job, you got boring school to come back to. I had some great vacations as a kid, which was great, considering I had some awful memories of school.

By the third day of vacation, I had finally reached 'vacation mode'. I was not worried about the money I spent. I was on vacation; I would pay for it later. I was wearing my contact lenses instead of my glasses. I had bought some cheap sunglasses, to look the part. My wife was loving the new me. The only time I showed any stress at all was driving at night, and even then I still laughed it off in a few minutes.

When I was a kid growing up in England, I had always imagined that America would be like California. It was the place of my dreams since I was a kid. It's funny really, America was the most incredible place we could imagine. It would be warm there, the weather was always perfect, at that age we didn’t realize that we would learn to appreciate sunny days, something that Californians have yet to do. I remember my friends and I knew nothing about 50 individual states, or any of that. We had only heard about California, New York City, Texas, and Washington D.C. That was it. We all imagined America was this really exciting place. They had skyscrapers, and fast cars, and surfers. In Texas everything was big. We didn’t know what D.C. stood for, but it must be important. We knew it was the capital of the U.S.A. And California, that was the mecca of our childish mind’s imagination. Movie stars live in California. You can surf in California. Skateboarding was invented in California. The Beach Boys came from California. What a let down, when I moved to Delaware, to come 3000 miles to end up living in a place with the same dismal weather as England; no, worse. Hotter in the Summer, colder in the Winter, less rain in general, so you don’t appreciate the sunny days, more humidity, mosquitoes, (and West Nile Virus, now). It also has less hills, and people with guns, who might actually shoot at you if you cross their property! I could go on and on about how awful America is now, and how comparatively wonderful England was then, but its all water under the bridge now.

So now I was there; in one land of dreams that I had been dreaming about from somewhere. Whenever I thought I might not make it back to England, I could always dream about going to California.

Our trip began by flying into L.A., this in itself is an amazing thing. You come across the mountain range, out of the Rocky Mountains, and down a little slope of desert, and you see that if it’s a daylight flight, but not if it’s a night flight, like this was, but then you hit the lights. Your plane cuts through a layer of smog, and fog, and some thick pollution, and you see endless lights, that seem to go on forever. There are tall ones, and small ones, and big ones and little sparkly distant ones. As your plane descends into them you can just make out different colors of lights, some bright white, and others yellowish street lamps, some neon and some flashing plastic, spinning slowly around. It’s a fair ground all year round. You finally see people walking, cars mostly, more lights, 7-11’s, more cars, and your plane touches down, and then you are part of it.

We got our standard rental car, and got out of the airport just as dawn was breaking. All these lights were all on at 5:30 am. Amazing, all that wasted power.

We took the rental car to my Uncle’s house on the outskirts of L.A.

L.A. is supposed to be so broad minded and diverse, but I just saw rich whites, and poor Mexicans. We happened to drive through Compton and South Central L.A. accidentally, on our way out of the airport. I was struck by how relatively clean, and boring it looked. All the famous gangster rappers of the ‘80’s came out of this place. There was this cloud that supposedly hung over South Central. It was this place with bullets flying all over the place. It was tough. I guess it changes at night. It seemed pretty harmless to my wife and me. There are sections of downtown Wilmington that look a lot worse. They are real ghettos. This must be the Disneyland version. It didn’t compare at all to Chester, PA. Even so, I didn’t want to overstay my welcome, so we continued on our merry way.

On the East Coast we have beaches, each supported by a little town , but L.A., now that was a beach city. I remembered an old friend of mine telling me about his exploits in Orange County when he was a kid, and he would go on and on about the gangs of California. The punks, the Skins, the Mods, the Rockers, Harley guys, and scooter guys. He was a California punk in Delaware, and I was an English punk in Delaware, so we were the best of friends. I imagine that his dreams of England were oddly similar to my dreams of America. He would recount endless stories about California, and when I got there I was not disappointed by his stories. Granted, I was older, and I was seeing this place as an adult, but I could easily imagine what it would have been like to be a teenager here. I could honestly envision him skateboarding across a whole city. You could do it. We saw kids doing it. We saw punks on scooters, and bikes, and tattooed ladies, and Mexicans with the occasional sombrero on, and so forth.

For teenagers, California is a wonderful place. For the super rich it is a playground. It didn’t seem half-bad for the poor. If you happen to be a bum on the streets, at least you don’t have to worry about freezing at night or shivering during the day on some heating vent. It was a little overwhelming for a newcomer like me, especially one who wasn’t entirely in vacation mode when he got there. It was fast paced and hip. L.A. was an eighteen year old, with a fast car. Here I was, an East Coast middle aged married guy in a station wagon.

The lifestyle there was definitely different, and I like to think I brought just a little part of it home with me. In fact I like to think that about every place I visit. You do often buy a souvenir, and some last, around your house. Then there’s the pictures, some you might actually print out, or blow up, if you really like them, so you can look at California any time you want, but the memories are the best part. You can just back and smile; that you know you were there. You can sit on the couch with your wife, and say "Honey, remember when we…" and then you smile and laugh, and feel good inside. If I had been 18 years old, I probably could have stayed in L.A. without a doubt, on the spot, no questions asked. Of course, I didn’t have a wife then, and a house, and cars, and bills, and responsibilities.

When we left to go there, in the few weeks beforehand, my wife and I were actually considering checking out the job market, seeing what was available out there, with the hopes of actually starting a new life out there; but we soon realized L.A. was all too crazy. As I remember, that is what my friend from California had said to me about the place, when he was only eighteen! L.A. can only be taken in small doses. That was his reason for moving back East. In L.A., we were on information overload, there was too much going on. My wife and I usually like to stop and "Zen Out" as we call it. We just sit there and watch cars pass, or people walk by, or boats drift along, and just relax our minds and our bodies, and let the vacation mode truly sink in to all our pores. However, I only think we did that about once or twice in a 10 day period, not up to our usual standards.

After our brief, and probably good that it was unexciting tour of L.A. we arrived at my Uncle’s house. Let me give you a little background on my Uncle to paint a picture. He, like everyone in California, is from somewhere else. Born, and raised in England, he moved here as a young man. He was an engineer, and became a toy designer for a major American toy firm. He did very well for himself in the early eighties, and was on the design teams that created some famous toys, and surrounded himself with all manner of objects. We had never been to his house before, so it was a new experience for my wife and I. We drove our economy car down the road through the lavish neighborhood and into his driveway. It wasn’t quite what I had expected. The neighborhood reminded me of the houses you see in the opening credits of The Brady Bunch. I had seen that TV show in black and white as a boy in England, and I thought all the houses in America looked like that. Growing up there, you got a very warped view of America. When we came up to his house, I was surprised to see that it was about the same square footage as mine. That made me feel a little better. There isn’t much room to move in L.A. Land is the greatest commodity. We have a couple of acres in PA. and it doesn’t seem that big a deal. I actually mow more lawn than actually belongs to me, the next lot over from our house being shared with my next door neighbor. That would never do in California. That lot would be built on overnight.

He greeted us at the door, and welcomed us to our guest room. The house was warm, and filled with all sorts of expensive junk. It was all gaudy and flashy. There were trinkets of value, next to things you couldn't get rid of, if you paid someone to take them. This uncle was definitely under the impression that more is more. Less is not more, and more is most definitely more! There wasn’t much room to sit down in the living room, most of the space being taken up by furniture, that didn’t look very lived in. In fact there was much more furniture in the room than needed to be there. Each person in the room could choose between 3 or 4 pieces of furniture. The house reminded me of a rich gaudy hotel that I would never pay to stay in, (I’d choose the Econo-Lodge down the road), so despite the fact that he seemed to shove us on our way quickly, we weren’t all that disagreeable.

We had a nice dinner that first day, with my Uncle, and his two sons. My Uncle is largely retired now, and he continues to play by living through the exploits of my two cousins. They seem to be living the typical California lifestyle, but I think it is beginning to wear them down, and they couldn’t seem to fathom the idea of living as we do, a happily married couple, with somewhat unexciting jobs, and a home, and bills. I’m actually quite happy to be an adult. I’m not one of those people who sits around worrying about how old I am, or why I can’t do things I should have done as a kid. I just find things that I can do now as an adult. I don’t need constant stimulation, and I have a pretty long attention span, by modern Western human standards. So, unfortunately for them I was not all that impressed by their recounting of which parties they had been to, and who they had hob-nobbed with. Listening to them talk was like watching one of those celebrity shows that come on TV after the news, I can stomach it for about 15-30 seconds, before I flick around in desperate need of history, or science, or even someone baking a cake. They continued recounting stories of the lifestyles of the rich and famous, and whose fancy mansion they been in. Connie looked at me, and we realized we were sitting at a table surrounded by people who had no real interest in us at all. They went on and on, and we just sat there quietly, after having finished our dinner.

After dinner I excused myself to go have a cigarette. The family was shocked. They didn’t know what to say. They couldn’t believe that I smoked cigarettes, but they were too nice to tell me all the ill effects of smoking, that just wouldn’t be politically correct. So they found an old ashtray, still in it’s box, still wrapped in plastic, with the price tag on, unwrapped it, and I was resigned to the deck.

One of my cousins friends, who had joined us for dinner, and he smiled as if knowing there was another side of society out there. He told us about the smog alerts in L.A. when he was a kid, when all the kids had to stay inside, for fear of ingesting the horrible air. The twins didn’t have to do that. Oh well, good for them.

When I walked out on my Uncle's deck the first day there; I was stunned. First, I was stunned by the view; it was simply breathtaking. Despite the overwhelming amount of pollution right off the shore on California’s beaches, the view was still amazing. As far as the eye can see, stone tiled rooftops, reminiscent of some Greek fishing village, but adorning much more lavish homes, bordered by snaky ribbons of clean asphalt, leading out to golden sand beaches, and topped off with crystal blue shimmering waters, with sailboats drifting by. My Aunt came out and glanced at the view, then said she often forgets how pretty it is there. Then I stepped back and I was again stunned for the second time. This time, by the realization that I was now an adult, maybe not a grown-up, but not doing any more significant growing up. My childhood and my adolescence too had passed me by, in a dull, gray, rainy place. It was still fantastic standing there on the deck, but slightly disheartening, and I don’t think I realized just how nice it was there until I got back to Delaware. My wife was the same way. By the third day in California, with the overwhelming hustle and bustle, and insanity of life, poverty stricken immigrants walking down one side of a street, passed by multi-millionaire’s in Mercedes’ on the other side of the street, we were convinced that we could not live there, but now that we’re back, we’re convinced that we were wrong! Either way, I always look forward to another vacation, so I’m willing to give the place another chance.

My Uncle is a very friendly man, but I felt as though he was fast running out of fun in this place. Everything in his house was yesterday’s toy. He had an E-type Jaguar (the car I had wanted to see, for years, the car I had been told about, the car in the garage, dusty, unkempt, with boxes of toys piled on top of it). When I asked him about it, he was taken aback, he had honestly forgotten about it. He took me downstairs, and showed it to me. I never got to take a ride in it. Who knows if it would even still run? He recounted a story of doing over 100 miles an hour on Highway 1 along the coast in it. Even the story sounded like a Disneyland ride. I respectfully declined to tell him about me doing over 100 mph on 202 in my old beat up Nissan Sentra. The story was told, the car was shown, he had done that, Next! His backyard had an overgrown basketball court in it, reached by a set of uneven steps. What he needed was a good landscaper like me to stay out there for a while and prune the trees, trim the bushes and look after the place for a while! It’s lucky I didn’t have my truck with me, or I might have volunteered to go out and start mulching the place. Another small path led to a disused hot tub and a picnic area. I took a walk on the Sunday morning before leaving his place, and spoke to one of his neighbors. She was shocked at first to see anyone up there. At first she was a little scared, but then I explained who I was, and she calmed down. She said she had never seen anyone using that little path before, and had never talked to my Aunt or Uncle, so she was very surprised to see me. I like to think I added a little spark of reality in their virtual lifestyles.

My Aunt and Uncle were astonished to hear about my 10 minute morning walk, and they seemed to have completely forgotten they even owned a hot tub, or had a basketball court up there. By the end of that day, they also seemed bored with my wife and I. There was apparently nothing we could tell them about the East Coast that was any more interesting or fast paced or hip than their life in California, so we parted ways.

We had to go and see San Diego. We drove like bats out of hell, literally, and arrived later that day in San Diego. It’s another L.A. A little more history, a little less money, a lot more Mexicans. Take Wal-Mart, and the Smithsonian Institute, roll it into a ball, and you’ve got San Diego. We drove around this place even more frantically trying to take it all in, and took in even less. We were glad to get out of there and back on the road the next day. You really can’t drive 1000 miles and do 3 major Californian areas in a week, and expect to get much out of it that will last you a lifetime. The thing I remember most about San Diego were these signs on the highway showing a distraught Mexican family crossing the road, much like you would see to watch out for deer crossing in Delaware or PA. I wish I had taken a picture of one. That’s part of the insanity, the juxtaposition of life on the West Coast. We spent an hour or two walking around the Hotel Del Coronado on the Mexican border, it was the haunt of many a 1920’s icon. It seemed to me, that one could just throw on a pair of swim trunks, and swim from Mexico, about an eighth of a mile up the beach and land unnoticed in America, but nobody seemed to be doing it. Maybe they know something I don’t. Anyway, I bought a nice mug there, which was under ten bucks. Not bad for a place that went for $350 per night minimum. We didn’t stay there, of course.

We drove up the Coast road to the North, and came to a more beautiful place. This time it was a little more laid back.

The scenery was fantastic. By that I mean you only had to drive 20 miles to the coast, or less, for the greatest ocean scenery in the country. Crashing waves, on rocks a thousand feet below a winding mountain highway, seals barking, convertibles and choppers whizzing by. 50 miles in the other direction and you'd swear you were in the Midwest. Then another 100 miles inland, and you were in the mountains, what a place.

There is a general fascination with all the new things, sports, and fads that California has to offer, but the amount of natural beauty there is often overlooked. I can only take so many fads and such, so traveling along Highway 1 on the Coast road to San Francisco was a welcome relief after the insanity of Southern California.

Before we arrived in San Fran we stopped in at the Hearst Castle. I had seen this as a kid, on a long strange trip I had been taken on. My Dad had thought at one point that he was going to go back to England, and not stay here permanently, and so he had taken my Mum and I, and we spent my third summer in America traveling the country. He got his boss and his wife from England to accompany us, and they managed to set up some contacts all over the place, and amazingly have the company pay for most of the trip. It was quite a trip. Not only did we go to a lot of major places we also stopped in at all sorts of off the wall spots. I have great memories from that trip, most of all from dangling my feet in the water off the back of a pontoon boat in Caddo Lake in Shreveport, Louisiana. Since my wife is from Shreveport, and we met in Delaware, we like to think that is where our souls first met, and we were meant to travel. When I told my wife that I had been to a lake 1500 miles from Delaware where she used to go and water ski with friends it was quite bizarre, but that is another story. Hearst Castle was another highlight of this trip. I remember there had been animals in the fields surrounding when I had last visited, (at the age of 10 or 11 I think) but they were all gone now. No more lions roaming the grounds, and herds of zebra running across the fields. After staying with my uncle, the place was not as gaudy as I had remembered it. Then again, I had 30 years of America under my belt, not just 2 ½ years as a kid. Hearst had actually done quite a nice job of filling the lavish rooms with a mix of antiquities from across the globe. No doubt many of these should reside in museums in Europe, but his was a different time. The opulent swimming pool surrounded by Greek and Egyptian statuary was quite magnificent. I could live there as long as I didn’t have to pay the electric bill, or clean the pool.

We continued our drive up the coast, and I picked up a nice pebble at Big Sur. It still resides on my mantelpiece. We saw some fantastic curvy trees, and smooth rock formations along the coast road, near the famous Pebble Beach golf resort.

We kept on driving. Finally, when we couldn’t drive any more, we pulled over, and we spent the night in a modest hotel in a small town outside of San Fran. That night it was actually quite cold. I think it was Twain that said that the coldest winter night he had experienced was a summer night in San Francisco or something like that. It was genuinely cold. Connie and I were glad we had packed a sweater, and a light jacket each. I spoke with some friendly local motorcyclists on a coastal tour up the same road, and stayed in the same little hotel. We ate a meager meal in a local fish and chip shop, and I was strangely reminded of how much like England this part of California was. The fog and mist twisted around me, with the backdrop of cliffs, and surfers. Only this wasn’t a dream, I was here with a beautiful wife by my side, walking arm in arm back to our hotel by the sea. Almost like two lands of dreams at the same time. The town was misty and foggy and cold, and was a welcome change from the dirty hot, steam of Southern California.

The next day we arrived in San Francisco. I believe it was around 8:30 am. That is a very fresh time of day. We were leaving out of San Francisco, so we didn’t have to be anywhere in particular for the next few days, which was a relief. We decided to get a hotel room for the night first, to have a base of operations from which to move around. We started with a simple bus tour of the city, as we usually do every time we visit a new place. It’s not the sort of guerilla type city tours that I used to do as an adolescent, but you actually do get to see a lot more sights, and you are told about things you might never have known. We saw all the major attractions, and then walked back to the ones we really liked. San Francisco was a real melting pot. We saw Chinese people, and Japanese people, and Whites, and not as many Mexicans, and Blacks, and I couldn’t discriminate to find the homosexuals. I was happy. In this madness, this bustle of all these different races, and creeds I felt just like everybody else.

We didn’t know where we were in the fog that covers the city in the morning, so we just stopped in at the first modest motel we could find. It happened to be in the Tenderloin district of San Fran. Later, a friend told me that the Tenderloin is one of the worst sections of the city, and we spent the night right in the heart of it. That first night we had a pounding on our door at 2:00 in the morning, then again at 3:00. We slept through it. I awoke to see a pimp talking to one of his ‘ho’s’ just 3 rooms down from us, and what looked like a crack dealer in the parking lot out front. We quickly got out of there. Luckily we had brought some coupons with us, and had a free night in a nice hotel, where we decided to stay for the reamining two nights, figuring we’ll just charge it, and pay for it later.

On our second day in San Fran, we took a long bus ride out to see Yosemite National Park. It takes all day, but it was well worth it. As an adolescent, I would have liked to do things like this. Hiking, and biking through this kind of territory around the country, but I was too busy boozing and losing. Like they say, youth is wasted on the young. The bus drove across some of the California wine country to reach Yosemite. We stopped at a roadside café for a bite of lunch. The mostly fat, old tourists, and a few families, and a couple of couples like us piled off the bus, and headed for the gift shop, and the snack bar. Connie and I stayed outside, and watched as tractors bumped across the dusty fields. There was a canal that had been following the road, and we saw little shanty towns, with mules, and chickens in coops every few miles. If you’ve ever been to the Midwest, this was it. If you just got dropped off here, you wouldn’t know the difference. There were lots of pickup trucks, and cowboys, and country music. Not too bad, overall. I’m not a country music fan as such, but it can be enjoyable from time to time, and it’s good travelling music, they weren’t actually playing it on the bus, but I could hear it in my head.

Arriving at Yosemite, we were given about 5 or 6 hours to take in the majesty of a million years of incredible rock formations, and overpowering cliffs, and a really nice gift shop filled with all sorts of great Ansel Adams photos. We stared in awe at the giant rock walls, and picked out courageous mountain climbers scaling the faces. On second thoughts, I don’t mind not doing that. The possibility of falling to your death greatly outweighs the pleasure I would get from knowing I climbed a big rock. I’m quite happy staring up at it, from the valley floor. What can I say? It was another experience much like seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time. It’s so big, and so overwhelming, that mere words can’t describe it. You’ve got to see it to believe it. Even pictures don’t do it justice. Connie took a few really good ones there, she’s the photographer in our group. I can take pictures, but she captures the emotions. I still have to go through them, and print some out, since we’ve switched to digital now. After a few hours of walking around with our heads constantly back, straining our necks to visualize the rocks, we were glad to get back on the tour bus. We just made it too. We were the next to last people on the bus. That would have been an expensive taxi ride back to San Fran. To me, that savings is just as exciting as climbing up the cliff.

The road out of Yosemite may have been the same one we took in, but it really gave you the feeling that this was a hidden valley, that had been discovered, in the mountains. You could really imagine the early settlers and indians finding this majestic place, and feeling some sort of spirtual connection to it. We had a few gaper delays on the way back—a scenic overlook or two, and an accident (supposedly the 40,000 or so acres of blackened forest that had been burnt to a crisp by a single match). How they were able to determine that I don’t know. I guess that was supposed to be shocking, and teach us great lessons, but I quite enjoyed looking at it. It gave you the ability to see the real lie of the land. The burnt trees didn’t take up as much space, and you could already see small saplings popping up around their grandfather’s ankles. Life was already returning to the dead place, within a few months. We had some light fare at the local KFC on the way back through cattle country. I don’t mind fast food. I’m a product of modern Western society, and I’m okay with it. If Yosemite gets built on someday, so be it. It might just burn down again, and then life will return shortly after. Life goes on, always. The thing those giant cliffs remind me of is just how small and insignicant we are in comparison to nature.

We arrived back in San Fran and went out that night for our traditional wedding Anniversary dinner out. We usually try to do seafood, and we try to see a lighthouse or two on our Anniversary trips. This time we ate at a place on Fisherman’s Wharf. I was completely stuffed, and Connie got a little tipsy. We walked back to our room, satisfied, having stuffed a lot into one day that was more filling than the meal itself.

I started to feel bad for all the people in San Fran who are getting a bum rap from all these mildly racist people on the East Coast. Sure, I joke about all kinds, but I don’t actually believe in any kind of racism, sexism or any kind of ism for that matter. But having met these easy going San Fransicans, I’m sure they wouldn’t be bothered much by what some pseudo-racist on the East Coast thinks. The driving in San Francisco was just as exciting as L.A., but the drivers in general were more relaxed. People would wave me on at stop signs, as if they knew we were from out of town, and needed a hand to find our way, as we tried to take in as much information as we could while speeding along. California proved to me that people could drive fast and still be courteous. Nobody seemed very concerned if somebody cut them off, or didn't signal there seemed to be much less horn blowing, and flipping off. It was as though they were actually glad we were there. We were the unofficial ambassadors of the East Coast, to be taking back the truth about Californians to our cynical Delawareans. People honestly seemed glad that we were visiting. I had heard that California’s economy was in trouble, but this was an unexpected side effect.

Having had a great interest in bikes for a long time, being a rider, and owning a motorcycle, I was in awe of the number of old, worn, but not worn out motorcycles and scooters on the roads everywhere we went. I told lots of people about them when I got back, then as I was telling one guy I suddenly realized that I’d rather be there riding one in the sun, in the day, and the foggy cold at night, instead of talking about them in the rain.

I'm starting to believe that a little more sunshine has a positive effect on people's attitudes.

Upon my return I was determined to change my life. I was still in Vacation Mode, and it took quite a while to get back out of it. I had seen new things, and met interesting people, and experienced new foods, and smells, and new reasons for living. I tried to stop it, but my vacation had decided to continue after I returned. It took me a few days before I got back into 'work mode'. Now it's like a hidden vacation. I'm here in body only; my spirit is still out there on the road. In fact, every time I get a little frustrated at work, or I am not given any urgent, immediate tasks, instead of sitting around doing nothing, I’ll just open up one of these files, start writing down my thoughts, and slip back into ‘vacation mode’.