reports

May 11, 2007

Planning a vacation in a foreign land can really be a pain, what with finding lost passports, figuring out currency exchange rates, and overcoming language problems (ours). Frankly, it sometimes makes sense to not even bother. That's how we ended up spending a week in the not-so-exotic—but still technically foreign— Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

Ever since I was an art student in college, I'd really only wanted to visit four exotic places: Egypt, Athens, Rome and the Playboy Mansion. (In recent years, I managed to cross two of those places off my 'to-do' list; Rome and the Mansion).

Naturally, I was psyched when some friends of ours invited us to go along on their trip to visit relatives in Greece. This was an especially rare opportunity since one of them actually spoke Greek. In hindsight, had we gone to Rome with someone who spoke Italian, we might still be welcome there today.

I just flew back from a wild weekend in California. And boy, are my arms tired. Yo, dudes. Check out this psycho-itinerary. Thursday, May 20th at 2:00pm, I jetted off to LA, and arrived at 8:00pm PST (that's 11:00pm my time). Crashed at my bud Barry's place, and forced his Significant Other to feed us. On Friday, I went to see the office where Barry no longer works, to do lunch. (Since then he moved to a more lucrative job and hopefully, an office that doesn't double as a filing cabinet.) After work we drove three hours north to eat at the world famous Harris Ranch. A fabulous steakhouse place surrounded by a lot of evidently, very clueless cows. Smelly, vile, manure-producing, cows. We assumed you could go out and choose the particular beast you want. Kinda like dooming a lobster.

Do you like garlic? I mean, really like garlic? I mean, like it so much you don't mind people gagging at your mere scent? Would you bathe in the stuff if you could? Then you've got to go to Gilroy, California. It is in the middle of nowhere (southeast of San Jose) and home of America's premier and darn near ONLY garlic resources. And guess what? They have a festival. Yeah!

The first thing we noticed as we pulled into Ontario Airport (outside Los Angeles, and calling it an "airport" is being generous) was the temperature. Sixty-seven degrees F. Nearly the identical temperature we had left back in SF. A bad start since we had chosen Palm Springs for it's warm, desert climate.

We flew out of Miami directly over Communist Cuba--playground of that fashion-plate, Fidel "Fatigues are always in style" Castro. Evidently there's a strip of air space that commercial airlines are allowed to fly through without being shot out of the sky by overzealous anti-arcraft gunners.

Miami isn't nearly as dangerous as most people had led me to believe. Oh, sure, on a recent trip I took a wrong turn and ended up in an area that would've given Chuck Norris bad dreams. But the South Beach area with its Art Deco architecture was inspiring. I felt like Michael J. Fox in one of those Back To The Future sequels.