Cody’s blog

This past week, I went to Long Beach to attend a two-day teaching event by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. It was hosted by the Geden Shoeling Center and held at the Long Beach Convention Center.

I found out about it through my temple, Mountain Spirit Center. Someone had photocopied a stack of ticket requests and left them on the table by the kitchen door. At first, I thought it sounded great, but figured it would be too expensive to go, since I’d have to stay in a hotel for at least two days. Then, the very next week, I got an email from the Westin Long Beach hotel, where we stayed when I ran in the Long Beach Half Marathon, advertising special $109 a night rates for trips through the end of September. Perfect! I went ahead and reserved a room for Thursday and Friday nights, and sent for my tickets.

The teaching was scheduled for two sessions on Friday, at 9:30 am and 2 pm, and one on Saturday morning at 9:30 am. I drove down Thursday afternoon so I’d be rested and ready to go Friday morning.

Theoretically, anyway. Thursday turned out to be a long, exhausting day. I hadn’t slept well to begin with, and then I decided at the last minute that I couldn’t leave the house in such a mess for my mom, who stays at my place to take care of the cats and fish while I’m gone, so I spent a couple of hours cleaning. Then a couple of hours packing. Then cleaned the fish tank, my usual Thursday chore. Then packed some more. I was only going to be gone for two days! You wouldn’t think it would be so hard to pack. Yet I always manage to forget at least one thing I need. (Once, it was socks. I wore the same socks for three days. Once it was scissors and tape for my bandages. I ended up buying a box of bandaids at the hotel gift shop and cutting the adhesive strips from them with my pocket knife.) This time, the one thing I forgot was a sweater or long-sleeved shirt. I knew it would be warm in Long Beach, but warm weather often equals cold air conditioning indoors, and I knew perfectly well from my previous stay that the hotel restaurant air conditioning was kept at refrigeration levels.

By the time I was finally ready to hit the road, I just wanted to go back to bed, not get in my truck and drive for three hours. But onward! I left home at around 1:30 pm, made a few stops in town (for gas, money, wash my truck, and to pick up a spare roll of cloth tape for my bandages), then finally headed out.

The drive was fine until I got to the 405 South just before LA. It was stop and go all the way to the 710. I knew that leaving in the afternoon I was going to have to deal with rush hour traffic when I hit LA, but I had no idea just how bad it was going to be. I turned up the stereo and crept along.

Finally arrived at the hotel at around 6 pm. What should have been at most a three hour drive took four and a half hours. I checked in, called my mom, set up my computer and tried to get online. Couldn’t get the Ethernet to connect, so, after restarting the modem and the computer and fussing with diagnostics, I finally called guest services. Thankfully, a very nice engineer came fairly quickly to replace the modem and make sure I was up and running. I promptly took the opportunity to catch a yellow dino egg from the Dragon Cave. Yay!

Then I grabbed some dinner in the hotel restaurant (where I froze in the air conditioning without a sweater) and collapsed for the night. Not a terribly auspicious start for my trip, but I was in Long Beach!

To be continued

I took my mom, Edna, to Old Edna for Mother’s Day. She’d seen an article about it in Westways magazine and wanted to visit a town with her name.

Things got off to a slow start. As mentioned yesterday, I had horrible allergies and slept badly the night before, so I was feeling pretty awful when we hit the road a little before nine a.m. In fact, I’d considered postponing the trip, but I knew Mom was really looking forward to it, and it was Mother’s Day, so I wanted to do it if at all possible. But it was a nice, sunny day and my head had cleared up a little after a long, hot shower, so off we went.

We took Highway 58 through Bakersfield, then 46 West across California. That’s my usual route up to the Bay Area as far as I-5, so that part was familiar to me. I stopped at the gas station/food mart at 46 and 5 for a rest stop, bought a 20-oz Coke to keep me going and took another dose of Nasalcrom, which finally made it possible to breathe through my nose without a struggle, and we continued on 46 toward the ocean.

Route 46 is a long, mostly straight two-lane highway through central California. We first passed through Lost Hills, with its oil fields. There’s a road there called Brown Material Road. I… don’t want to know exactly what Brown Material it’s named after. Then there are vast fields of tumbleweeds, piled up against fences and in mounds wherever the wind has tossed them. Occasionally, there are cattle grazing on the hillsides, and wildflowers dotting the shoulders of the road. It was a lovely drive, not much traffic, beautiful scenery.

Eventually, we reached Paso Robles, where we got on 101 South and drove another twenty miles or so to San Luis Obispo. Then we got off the freeway and went another five miles or so down CA-227 until we reached Old Edna!

Old Edna is a small compound along the road with an antique store and café, a few historical outbuildings, and a bed and breakfast. It’s charming and rustic and full of many signs saying “Old Edna,” all of which I photographed my mother standing next to.

Our first stop was the Café, which, very luckily, was open—there was a sign on the door saying, “Now open on Sundays! Beginning May 11!” So we had, totally by chance, chosen the first Sunday they were actually open to visit. No, it never occurred to me to call ahead and make sure of their hours. Mom says she thought of it, but didn’t. So we’d taken a chance and got lucky. The antique store was closed, but we weren’t there for shopping, and we could see most of it from the café, which is in the same building with a half-wall separating them.

The café was very busy, and they were rapidly running out of most of their food. I had a fresh Mozzarella sandwich with pesto on focaccia and a walnut-date bar for lunch, very yummy. I had also forgotten to make sure I had enough cash with me, but fortunately I had enough to pay for our lunches and buy Mom a few postcards. Then we wandered around a bit and looked at the site and took pictures. Mom told the owners she was 88 years old and her name was Edna, so she was Old Edna, too! They thought it was very cool that we would drive all the way from Tehachapi just to see them. They told us about a nearby winery called Edna Valley Vineyards, so when we’d seen all there was to see at Old Edna, we headed off there to buy some Edna Valley wine for Mom to give to people.

The winery was also very beautiful and picturesque. Mom bought three bottles of Chardonnay, a tee-shirt, and a postcard. I bought a cap and some chocolates.

By then, it was 2 p.m., and time to head home. We made a couple of stops along the way, at a rest area, and then at Murray Family Farms. I picked up some local raw honey, which I’ve heard is good for pollen allergies, and used it in my morning cocoa. Pretty tasty! We’ll see if it actually does any good for my allergies. And I got some Rainier cherries, which are my favorite cherries, yum!

We got home around 6 p.m., tired but happy. My mom really enjoyed her day, so I’m glad we went, even though I was feeling pretty yucky a lot of the time. I had a good time, too.

Here are a few photos of Old Edna.