Closing the Book

Liz may wind up writing a little something of her own to cap our vacation journal, but here's my stab at summarizing a few of the details we've missed.

First of all, we made it back safely to Newark, somehow caught our connections into the city and now are heading home on the Metro-North train to New Haven with an ETA of 4 a.m. Not too tired but getting there. Mostly looking forward to the end of travel, after a six-hour car drive, five-hour flight and now a few hours on trains.

As Liz mentioned in her last post, we visited USC on Thursday, the first time I had been back to the campus since my roommate Hanvey and I sealed the final box of our stuff in May 1998 and pointed his rickety minivan in the direction of the Northeast. The campus hadn't changed much in a decade, though I don't know if I'd notice if it had. I still remembered the key landmarks and had a few boring stories to tell Liz at each of our stops, but the place doesn't really have much emotional resonance anymore. Even so, I bought an SC baseball hat and am wearing it now. Go Trojans!


Some of our most pleasant moments on the trip were spent on beaches, starting with the beach at Carlsbad, where my Aunt Liz works. No alcohol allowed on this beach, she says, so we tried to act sober. Ha... just kidding.

And of course, we had a wild time on the beach in Santa Monica, first walking down the boardwalk and stopping by the Mexican restaurant at the end of the pier. Liz suggested ordering the big margaritas, and by big, I mean the biggest you've ever seen. They were also the best I've ever tasted, and they cost the most money I've ever spent on a single drink ($22 a piece!!!). After dark, we followed up dinner with a walk along the beach, running in and out of the surf.


We also had a good time visiting Ginger and Gerard, who had opened their home to me in college when I needed to get away from Los Angeles and school for a weekend. They're good people, and they took us to their local Fourth of July parade, which was more fun than you'd expect from a small-town parade like that. They live in Arcadia, Calif., in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. My cousin Louellen, who lives about a half hour away, stopped by to say hello and have dinner with us last night.

There's plenty more I could write about, and certainly plenty more photos I could attach — we took a few hundred and will eventually post them in a Picasa gallery — but I'll leave it at that for now, with one last detail. My grandparents are buried in a Mojave desert city called Victorville, not far from where they lived, in Phelan. I wasn't able to get to their funerals several years ago, so I wanted to stop by on this trip and visit their graves, even though the cemetery is about an hour away from Arcadia. We drove up after the parade Friday, and because of the holiday the cemetery office was closed. So we didn't have any help in finding the graves, but after strolling the rows for maybe 20 minutes I finally came across the memorial stone. I didn't know my dad's parents as well as I'd have liked, since they lived far away away for most of my life, but it meant a lot to finally be able to say goodbye in person.