Driving to LA...the beginning of the end

If you paid attention to these posts, you may have noticed that I had a little too much wine that last night in Santa Barbara. Unfortunately for everyone, Tuesday was my day to drive. And I had to drive to LA...good times.

As other posts will show, we did a little surfing the last morning in SB, which we planned poorly regarding getting packed etc...and out of the hotel by noon. We are slightly salty, and starving. We pull over in a little town for a slice of pizza (under normal circumstances this would have kicked my headache right out the door), but when I stepped on the broken Modelo beer bottle in the parking lot it put me back in a foul mood. Even more frustrating might have been the young man at the pizza counter who didn't have a First Aid kit (which is illegal BTW!). Pizza was sub-par, and my mood worsened until Kel and Kim took me to "Coffee bean and Tea Leaf" for a pick me up.

Now: the drive to LA: What madness! Luckily we are 3 people and qualify for HOV lane activity (although this wasn't exactly a drastic improvement from the other 19 lanes!). We rarely had timing problems with the GPS, but on this particular trip, we added 48 minutes to the drive.

But we arrived, safe and sound in Palso Verdes. We had our "last supper" together, as Kelly and Kim took off for the East Coast early the next mornign and I hung out in LA to spy on more wine lists, cocktail menus and wine merchants until the 14th.

Banging surfboards...

When we wake early Tuesday morning, we decide to do a dawn patrol with our rental boards at the beach. What starts as a "quick walk" turns into us chasing breaks down the beach, until we were (in Melissa's opinion) dangerously close to the locals.


Kelly did amazing, she surfed for nearly 3 hours. Kim and I took a turn or 2 each, before check-out time crept up on us and I dashed for the car to haul our belongings back in.