Home again

Back home again. And what a trip it was.

Saturday I had nothing planned, so I decided to drive up to Topanga Canyon and maybe take a little hike. This ended up being a quintessential LA experience. To make it more scenic, I decided to try to follow the coast by taking the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH), and it was pleasant enough, although (surprise, surprise) traffic was heavy, and it took most of two hours to get there. I parked in the lower parking lot and wandered over to the Dead Horse Trail head. There was a map that made no mention of how long the trail was, which vexed me, as I had brought no water with me and only a banana to eat.

I started up the trail and my first thought was that this looked like good mountain lion habitat. So now I was paranoid about being pounced on and began keenly scanning the undergrowth. Then I thought to myself that with all this scanning of the undergrowth, I was likely to miss any rattlesnakes sunning themselves on the trail and step on one. I was really enjoying my hike.

The trail turned out to only be about 1 mile. I saw no mountain lions or rattlesnakes (but lots of little lizards). My banana was a perfect snack, and I did not dehydrate. I did decide, however, to walk on the road back down to my car.

So now it was time to drive back down to San Pedro. I made the mistake of deciding to take the 405. Saturday afternoon, and it was a virtual parking lot. It took me most of an hour to get down to LAX, and then I got off and tried Santa Monica Blvd and the PCH. It took me about 2 1/2 hours to get back to the apartment. Ugh. All that for a 1 mile hike.

Sunday was my flight back home, except that an equipment failure led to the cancellation of the flight. After a full afternoon of waiting for my luggage to appear, I ended up staying at the airport Hilton (no sign of Paris; maybe she was locked up), and flew home the next day. A trip of minor catastrophes completed.

Our house is now officially on the market (see if you can find the listing in MLS). We are getting new kitchen flooring installed today, and we still need to get the hole in the wall repaired, but besides that everything is pretty much in order. Now if we can only keep it that way until it sells. (Encouragingly, a house down the street sold in 22 days.) Yesterday we had an open house for real estate agents, and they had very positive things to say about the house.

Now we just need to arrange our move...