Around The World – California
My goal for my three weeks in California is to stay with Sean Lee, relax, visit old friends and towns and do one very, very special thing that I will describe below…
The first day was mostly lying on the couch, eating cold pizza. I managed to stay up to watch Elon Musk on the new Colbert show. Frankly, it was pretty awful, Stephen barely gave Elon time to speak and kept calling him a supervillain. Watch it on the YouTubes if you’re interested.
OK, so here is the special event – a tour of the Tesla Motors factory in Fremont! Woo hoo! This is an electric car geek’s Mecca, the Holy Grail of electro-chemical propulsion. To spare the folks who are sick of me talking about electric cars, I made a video of the notes from the tour, you can watch it here.
On the way home, we stopped in to see my 914 in storage at the Paso Robles airport hangars. I called the hangar manager Mac ahead of time and he met us there. We saw the 914 and I’m very happy that it still looks great. Under the protective cover, the paint is still good and there are no mice problems.
I tried a couple more cellular providers but nobody has towers that are compatible with the 3G radio in my phone. I finally found another AT&T store and signed up, works well. The price is just OK with a 1 GB data plan.
Sean is always marketing his real estate business around the area so we set up his booth at the Avocado & Margarita festival at the Embarcadero in Morro Bay. In a case of very-small-world, I saw Bryce Halford and Nadia Cordero from my old solar company REC as they strolled through the festival.
That night, we went to the Avila Beach Aquarium charity dinner, as Sean’s father is a board member. Of course, the food all had onions so I ate a lot of bread and drank a lot of wine. More small-world as I saw Jim Pardue and Alex Griffiths from REC there too.
On Monday, I visited with my old team at REC Commercial and then went to lunch with them at Thai Boat. The guys who run the restaurant remembered me and say they’ll visit when they come home to Bangkok next time. I then visited the SnapNrack and the new SunRun solar teams. I stopped in at my chiropractor Erin Ahlberg- Parsons and then walked around downtown San Luis Obispo and bought tickets for Tears For Fears at the Vina Robles amphitheater.
The next day I headed up the Grade to Paso Robles and visited with my former coworker Amber Dunham while her daycare kiddos were napping, and brought lunch. I spent two hours walking through Lowe’s, fondly remembering all of my old power tools.
I met Debra Binder and Greg at their house when they got home from work. We went to Jaffa in Paso for dinner, yummy as I remember.
In the morning, I went through the plastic bins I have stored in Deb’s back bedroom and pulled out some paperwork I need to take home with me. I made my way back south through Paso Robles and Atascadero back to Sean’s house. I stopped at my old Habitat for Humanity ReStore and made sure the sign I built was still in good shape, our old Paso sports club, the Paso Ford dealer where I sat in a Ford Focus Electric and talked electric cars with the guys there, Mayan Hardwood where I used to buy most of my woodworking supplies and drove past my old house. The house has been sold yet again since I left and they’ve done a bit of work around the property but have let my xeriscaping in the front yard go to hell…
I stopped in at the Atascadero Tesla Supercharger, still running strong since it was under final construction just as I left two years ago.
On Friday I visited my financial advisor for a face-to-face review of the last two years and build plans for the future. US finance laws prevent him from working directly with me while I’m overseas, so I have Deb set up as my local proxy when I need something handled. Despite a recent dip in the market, things are still looking good for my portfolio so it looks like I still get to live a frugal retirement!
I spent the weekend at Jim’s house, who now works at one of the largest solar power sites in the world. We had pizza and talked about life in Thailand, he really wants to come back over when his finances allow.
On Saturday night, we went up to the Tears For Fears concert at the Vina Robles Amphitheater in Paso. I had a great time, the band sounded just like back in the 80s, but others in the group sitting in different seating areas had their share of trouble with drunks and women with big puffy hair who wouldn’t sit down…
I woke up at 5AM to watch the Singapore F1 race on my phone. Lewis qualified badly and eventually dropped out of the race, not a good one for the good guys…
Woke up again later and went to Sea Pines golf course to play with Jim and Sean. The holes are short and forgiving, I shot 41 on par 31, with a birdie and a par. I was happy that my shots were going well all day, mostly straight and long, felt really great after not playing for about 4 months.
On Monday I drove back up to Paso to visit our favourite winery Graveyard Vineyards. I had a great visit with Paula Campbell-Taylor. Brought back happy memories when Allie and I would go over for tastings or special dinner nights.
Sean and I were invited over to his friend Jennifer Journey’s house. She is an amazing cook and made Indian food with no onions for me, delicious!
Next afternoon I drove to Paso and stopped at Target and bought two pairs of cargo shorts for $6.88 each, on sale from $23! My two-year-old cargo shorts have served me well but the fabric was disintegrating and no amount of mending and patching could save them.
I met up with friend and fellow HD-caregiver Carol von Ehrenkrook, talked for a while then went for Chinese food. Met daughter Lexi when she got home from her hectic after-school activities. Great to see both of them after two years.
By this point I had burned through my 1 GB AT&T data plan so had to top up. A bit confusing but managed to get my data working again. Man, the US and Canada really need to look at how the cell companies in other parts of the world handle their voice and data plans and top-up strategy.
In preparation for a homemade pizza night, Jen picked me up and we went to the dunes area south of the Oceano Dunes. Her niece Frish is visiting, freshly graduated from nursing school in Manila and is looking for a job here. I contributed to dinner by spreading the dough and cutting the tomatoes and mozzarella. Crispy crust, just the way we like it.
Sean and I headed back to his house and prepared for an offshore fishing trip the next day. We set up the reels with new line, and selected lures and weights.
The next morning we woke up at the unholy time of 4:30 AM. Sean’s neighbour Larry came with us, he has partial sight so Sean and I gave him a hand during the day. Once on the boat, we putted 2 hours north, almost all the way to Hearst Castle and ended up about 2 miles offshore in 200 feet of water. We could have driven to San Simeon and boarded at the pier there, seems like a lot of wasted time and queasy stomachs in the swell…
I turned down the offer to put $10 into the jackpot for biggest fish of the day. I never get lucky so no point, right?
We arrived at the first spot around 8 AM, all 20 people drop lines straight to the bottom. Some are using shiny fake-fish-looking jigs, some have 2 hooks with squid, I did the squid. Immediately I felt tugging and pulled up two small orange rock cod. Sadly, they don’t seem to survive the trip to the surface, eyes all bulged out and floating.
The next drop I got another orange rock cod but it was being eaten by a large lingcod that also got hooked! It turned out to be the biggest fish of the day at 13.8 pounds but I didn’t win the contest since I didn’t enter!
As we headed back home at 2 PM, the deckhands filleted and skinned the fish. $1 per fish or $2 for big ones, great price. They had very, very sharp knives and were very practiced. Seagulls loved the discarded fish parts.
After a shower and quick nap, we headed over to Cal Poly to see the La Guitarra concert and tribute to the Romero family. It’s worth a search to watch videos of the elder Romero and his sons and grandsons performances.
The next day I did all of my laundry and pre-packed in preparation for my trip to EVCCON tomorrow.
Exactly the relaxing stopover and visit with old friends I was hoping for!
