On a trip in California. San Francisco. Pacific Coast Highway. Los Angeles. Beautiful here on the other side of the country. And chilly. Lots of thoughts. Lots of loves and hates. Typed them into iPhone. Here they are:
Hate: Typing into iPhone. All mays trying to correct my words and spelling. My spelling is horrible! Deal with it iPhone! You will just screen it up anywhere.
Love: San Francisco. What a town. Friendliest people. Fog rolling in all the time. Cool museums. Breakfast places that serve smoked chicken apple sausage with eggs. I have found the address to Heaven.
Hate: Walking around San Francisco singing: “Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco treat.” Out loud! Do you know how embarrassing that is? Couldn’t even control it. Totally involuntary. The only way I could get it out of my head was to sing Spice Girls instead. Then people really started staring at me.
Hate: Catching a cold on the flight out. A lingering cold that hung around until (miraculously) the day we flew out.
Love: NyQuil. Even with its terrifying warnings about liver damage and operating forklifts. That’s what I call a night out on the town.
Love/Hate: That if we see a hill, we go climb that hill. That’s our family motto. We might burst blood vessels. We might be so out of breath at the top that we need an oxygen cart. But give us an incline and we charge.
Love: Cable cars. Second only to interstellar ion-drive spaceships. Why charge up a hill when you can ride instead?
Love: How my 6-year-old daughter’s favorite thing is to “go exploring.” Doesn’t matter where. Doesn’t have to be fancy, expensive or touristy. In fact, usually it’s some quaint, out-of-the-way neighborhood that draws her attention. Why? Because there’s a cat or a gnome in someone’s yard.
Hate: Tourists on bikes. Quite possibly more dangerous than wrestling drunken bulls. They wobble and teeter about like they’ve never been on two wheels before. Half of them went over the side on the Golden Gate Bridge while yelling, “Look! Alacatraz!”
Love: Row boating.
Love even more: That my daughter is pretty good at it. She loves to row. Forget that she is as skinny as a two-piece-of-straw scarecrow. She toured my wife and I around San Francisco’s Stow Lake like a pro. Even charged us at the end.
Love: A brand new rental car with (no kidding) only 14 miles on it.
Hate: The smell of new brakes as they’re tested out in the mountains. Smelled like flaming marshmallows. Did not instill confidence in the driver while overlooking steep cliffs. People smelling them muttered to each other, “Those people are going to die.”
Love: How every time I said, “This is awesome. Totally amazing. Nothing could top this” … something would come along and top it.
Love: Rocky Pacific Coast beaches with sea otters twisting about in the kelp.
Hate: That a Floridian like me would die if I so much as dipped a tiny toe in.
Love/Hate: Feeling obligated to spend $7 on a car wash before driving the once-clean rental car to visit friends in L.A. “I think it’s illegal there to have a car this dirty,” my wife said. “We’ll probably get impounded.”
Love: Watching the sun set over the roaring Pacific. All the while thinking how it is now rising in some far off land even farther from my Atlantic-bound home. If only there was a hill to go charge up and watch it from. Would have loved that.