April 3 - United States: 

Heidi: Los Angeles, CA 

Jon: Los Angeles, CA to Washington, D.C.

From Heidi - The Plan for the Next Two Weeks

Here's our plan for the next two weeks.  Jon is flying to DC to buy his Mom's old car.  Then he's going to drive it across the country to pick me up in LA.  When he finally arrives, we'll begin our tour of the U.S.  Now, this sounds a bit nutty that we're going to all this trouble for a car, but here are our reasons:

1. The car is (hopefully) a good deal for the price.  Jon knows the maintenance history like the back of his hand, and he's said for years that he wants to buy it.  So, his Mom was ordering a new car and offered to sell us the old.  In other words, we think it's worth the cross-country drive.  With our luck, it'll turn out to be a lemon.
2. If I'd gone with him to DC, it would have cost us an extra plane ticket.  It also would have meant that, most likely, we would have arrived in DC and lost motivation to travel back out west.  Basically, I'm staying in DC as collateral.

So Jon's flight was out of Irvine at 6:30 this morning.  Irvine is a little over an hour's south of LA, and since he needed to check in at 5:00AM, we needed to leave at 4:00AM.  After a measly three hours of sleep, we dragged ourselves out of bed at 3:00AM and hit the road.  *Yawn!*.  But we made it in good time and without trauma.  This will be the first time Jon and I will be apart in ten months.  That is, the first time that we've spent more than a few hours apart.  Tonight's going to be weird for me.

I made it back to Hollywood Hills and chatted with Ketron as she got ready for work.  Then I took my tired body back to bed for five hours.  Didn't wake up until 1:30.  Then I watched "Legally Blond" on Ketron's VCR, and then "The Right Stuff" on cable.  So since I did nothing today (we would call this a "cave day"), here are a few random ruminations about LA:

• Land of Freeways: LA is one big land of freeways.  I swear that's all I've seen in this city so far.  Roadways and concrete.  Its downright depressing.  And the freeways are all massive.  Like, ten lane freeways.  Jon and I found it interesting to compare this with the freeways in Australia, which were usually two lanes and occasionally more near the cities.
• Drivers Worse Than In India: Along the same lines, the traffic here is unbelievable!  Cars are everywhere.  And the drivers are insane.  Certifiable.  Not quite as certifiable as those in India, but at least there they drive clunky cars that support the way they drive.  Here, there's something unnerving about seeing a Lexus SUV swerve in and out of traffic like the driver could car less about dents and scratches.
• Bizarre Driving Etiquette: The name of the driving game in La is tailgating.  If you leave even a half a car length in front of you, everyone in LA will try to squeeze into it.  So you have to tailgate as a means of self-preservation.  The other thing is left-hand turns.  At a traffic light on a two-way street, the light will rarely have a left hand turn signal.  And the traffic will rarely have a break to turn.  So, nine times out of ten, this means that we wait for the light to to turn yellow and the oncoming traffic to stop, and then we run the yellow/red light.  "We" includes ourselves and at least two other cars in the left turn lane.  It's a culturally acceptable move here.

Walk on Mulholland Drive 

When Ketron got home from work, we suited up for a long walk and headed up into the Hollywood Hills.  The walk was a steep one, and up through Mulholland Drive.  This means that we got as close as one can get to the "Hollywood" sign without actually standing there.  The homes were beautiful, but also very precariously balanced on the sides of hills.  So the "front" of the house is a small piece of house with a garage.  The bulk of the house stretches back and down the side of the hill.  It really weird to see, because these homes look like they're absolutely tiny from the front, but in reality they are quite large.  And pricey too!  One of the more contemporarily-designed homes was on the block for $1.5million.  What a bargain!

Another in a series of guest appearances by Jon

Flying to DC

So I booked my flight out of John Wayne Airport in Irvine, having learned while traveling to LA for work that this is an easy airport to get into and out of.  The only problem is that the flight is at 6:30am, I need to be there two hours before the flight leaves, and the drive will take about an hour from Hollywood.  If you are doing the math at home this means that Heidi and I need to leave for the airport at 3:30am and I need to get up at about 3am so we can pack the car.  Not the best way to start the trip, especially since I got to bed last night at midnight!  Oh well, I should be able to sleep on the plane.

The flight to Houston then on to Dulles was rather uneventful.  I did notice the National Guardsmen at the security checkpoint with the machine gun, and found it somewhat reassuring that there is a more pronounced sense of security at the airports these days.  But like my friend Mike Iovino says, the Guardsmen are really just accountants and lawyers and most likely have no real inclination to use the machine gun in a crowded airport.  I guess it's the sense of security that they're going for.

I got to DC on time, collected my bags (actually a bag and one very large box that had the cooler in it), and my mom met me at the airport and we headed back toward her house.  It was great to be back in a place that I actually knew how to get around.  I didn't need a map and could navigate easily from one place to the other...ah, familiarity.

We met my sister, Shannon, and her kids (Amanda, Little Jay, and Joseph) for dinner at one of their favorite places, Milano's, for pizza.  Shannon's husband Jay met us after he got out of work and we all had a great time.  Amanda was so excited to give me a gift that they had gotten for me months ago:  Trivial Pursuit, the Star Wars Edition.  

By the time we finally made it home everyone was exhausted but I ended up busying myself with trying to print our IRS extension on Mom's printer.  Needless to say, that was fun!