south

Headed south today on a road trip to Los Angeles. Met up with my friend Trung in San Jose, loaded my stuff into the rental car (Taurus), programmed the navigation system (it came in very handy on this mapless trip) and drove out at 12:30ish in the AM. Night driving is fun. Trung drove first and we switched places just before we got off the CA-152 to I-5. Interstate 5, for those that don't know, is a long, straight, boring freeway that runs smack dab north-south down the center of California from Mexico to Oregon. It's a pretty uneventful drive except for the ginormous Harris' Ranch that left me trying to hold my breath for a good 15 miles. Harris' large cow farm edges the interstate for a good couple of miles but can be smelt from miles away.

Pretty uneventful trip down, Trung slept most of the way after I took over driving. At a gas station before the ascent up the mountains that open up to the valley where Los Angeles sleeps, I change our navigational system's destination. It was aimed at our hotel in Manhattan Beach most of the trip but I switched it to Randy's Donuts which was to be the first stop in the "foodie" part of our trip. ( Not really a "Foodie" trip per se, but, we visited some of the more famous, "quirky" eating destinations in LA)

You've probably never heard of Randy's Donuts. It's actually not much of a place to quell your donut cravings. The donuts themselves were quite average at best and the coffee I got in their souvenir commuter mug was little more than flavored water. But it is famous for one thing... The gigantic donut-shaped sign on top of the building that proclaims its wares. See to the left, a picture of Trung enjoying an "apple crepe" beneath the sign (note the commuter mug on the car trunk near the bottom right corner). Being 7:00 in the morning, we weren't able to contact my friend Dorothy who promised us a lunch at a famous LA joint and a tour of Hollywood. We headed to a Rite Aid to pick up a few things we forgot to pack and found an IHOP to enjoy a sit-down breakfast. We also stopped at nearby LAX to officially add me to the driver list of the rental car.

After the trip to the airport, it was still too early to call my friend, so, we decided to consult our navigation system for a destination nearby to kill an hour or two. Venice Beach was on the list so we entered it in and drove on over. Now 9:00 in the morning is not the time to come to Venice Beach. The place had people milling about but most of Venice was still asleep and most of the merchants were just starting to set up their shops. It was still quite overcast at the beach that morning but the palm trees gave hint of the sun and fun that this place was noted for.

At 10:30ish we gave Dorothy a call and she promptly gave us her address to get to her apartment to pick up her and her boyfriend, Brett. We were inputting the address into the nav. system and it crashed on us. After a few tries at restarting the console and starting and restarting the car I called tech support and Trung got his lap top out of his car. Tech support finally told us that the system's harddrive probably crashed and we'd either have to drive without it or exchange the car for one with a working system. We chose to exchange the car and that led to an hour of checking the car back into LAX, grabbing all our stuff, getting a new rental, a Ford Five Hundred (yeah, never heard of it before either) and then off to pick-up Dorothy and Brett.

To be continued....