Back from the Sunny Shore

Again, I've been delinquent about posting, but due to overwhelming public demand (thanks, Carlos), I'm back to harass, harangue, and generally blather away from my little virtual soapbox-in-the-ether.

I enjoyed the trip to California, although I quickly realized that the comfort level on crowded, long-distance late-night "cattle car" flights between major cities was going to be very different from what I was accustomed to on shorter and less crowded flights. I also realized that I much prefer flying out of small airports like those at this or thisrather than overcrowded, Dante-esque multi-terminal places like LA International. The Detroit Metro Airport is somewhere in between the two extremes, being fairly new, spacious, and more-or-less logically laid out.

Being trapped in LAX for eternity, with no boarding pass or means of leaving the airport, would be a fair approximation of Hell.

"Saint Barbie" is a very pretty town, but as usual, there's a catch. The median house price is about $550K, and the oh-so-chic residents have passed all kinds of entertaining laws to govern themselves. Among them is a requirement that all construction -- even a Burger King -- must be Spanish Colonial. Now I have nothing particularly against courtyards, or stucco walls, or tile roofs, but an entire city built in a uniformly "cute" architectural style is uncomfortably reminiscent of The Village. And, of course, there are precious few library jobs that will permit one to shell out a mil or two for a house. Most of the people who work in the library seem to commute for an hour or two each morning, and back again in the evening.

Talking with the folks at the library early on the morning of the interview quickly revealed that they were particularly interested in presentations involving electronic show-and-tell, so I scrapped the presentation I had planned to do (for which I was going to rely heavily on verbal interaction, handouts, etc.) and improvised a talk about a subject for which I had prepared an electronic research guide which was accessible on the Internet. I easily managed to fill the allotted time, since it was on a subject in which I have a particular personal interest, but not in a terribly organized fashion. Time will tell what the search committee thought about it.

Saturday was devoted to seeing the sights of Saint Barbie. The South Coast Railroad Museum, in a relocated depot building about a mile from the university, has a model railroad display depicting S.B. when it was a division point yard on the Southern Pacific's Coast Line, as well as a somewhat larger "model railroad" and other exhibits. Unfortunately, although the model railroad looks like it could be operated so as to duplicate the actual operations of the SP, I was informed that it's rarely used for anything but round-and-round display operation nowadays. The Mission and Presidio in were interesting, if a bit crowded in their built-up urban setting, and the State Street shopping district yielded a few interesting restaurants and bars, although the high rents have apparently driven out all the secondhand bookstores, leaving only the Two Big B's. (Those who think that I stood on principle and refused to buy anything from the B's don't know me very well.) A little Thai restaurant supplied a lamb curry with a fieriness balanced exquisitely on the line between pleasure and pain, and a glass of a locally-brewed pale ale provided a nice cool-and-sharp counterpoint. A few dubious business concepts made me shake my head, as when something called Bogart's Bar advertised "genuine Irish style".

Guess I didn't know His Coolness was Irish. (Shakes head, walks on down the street....)

Sunday was devoted to driving around aimlessly to see if I could find any place less grossly overpriced. The crooked, challenging highways through the startlingly jagged coastal mountain range were fun to drive, especially since the rental outfit at the airport had supplied me with a sexy black Mustang instead of the dowdy four-door midsize car I'd reserved. This sleek, sable FelixMobile surely struck fear into the hearts of other drivers on the road, especially when its driver suddenly realized that he needed to be three lanes over on the highway, or decided on the spur of the moment to veer into one of the sightseers' roadside parking spots overlooking a precipitous coastal cliff. It was almost cool enough that I could hold my head up amongst the ubiquitous Porsches and Beemers and Hummers.

"Saint Inez", located about twenty miles inland, proved to be almost as overpriced as Saint Barbie. A kindly and condescending real estate agent advised me to try about twenty or thirty miles further west, near the air force base. While eating a chicken-and-brie sandwich at a local winery/restaurant, I listened to the local horsey set chat about their concerns. The waiter was Hispanic and very obsequious. The historical society across the street was exquisitely decorated, hushed, and watched over by a very dignified lady who made it quite clear that she had better things to do than chat with the hoi polloi. While I was there, a nervous-looking blonde, in high heels and dressed to the nines, arrived for her appointment to discuss volunteering. Meanwhile, I looked over their well-preserved and/or professionally-restored collection of 19th-century carriages and stagecoaches and peered in the windows of what must be the world's smallest public library (a frame building, about 10 feet square, open only on Saturdays from 2 to 5).

The nearby "Saint Inez" mission was well-preserved, but between the Mass in progress and the sign (like the one in Saint Barbie) demanding a $4.00 ticket for a "self-guided tour", I decided I'd pass on anything more than a cursory walk around its exterior.

It's just as well. "Purity" Mission, out in a less crowded area, was a knockout by comparison. Less successful as a mission, it's more successful as a historical site. After being abandoned in the 1800's, it fell into ruins and was reconstructed as a historical site in the 1930's by the CCC, complete with rebuilt irrigation channels, animal corrals, workrooms, gardens, etc. I could easily have spent all day wandering around the place, and I couldn't help but think that it would be the ultimate site for a live-action Old West roleplaying game. Turns out that, according to one of the park rangers, it is in fact used as a set for television and film scenes from time to time.

(Feel free to make comments about me preferring churches as historical artifacts over churches as living institutions....)

This nearby town looked like a place I might be able to afford to live in, although by this time it was too late in the day to find any apartment leasing offices open. So I drove out to the local beach -- much more attractive, and cleaner, than the ones near Saint Barbie, with an Amtrak depot and railroad junction to boot! Unfortunately, although it was open on the day I visited, it seems one cannot count on that always being true.

Closed the day by following the Lompoc Branch of the railroad back to town, noting several modelable features (short length, attractive scenery including fields of commercially-grown flowers in addition to the aforementioned beachfront junction with the mainline, and a small-town terminal with a steeply-climbing switchback spur up San Miguelito Canyon to a plant producing diatomacious earth), then driving back to Santa Barbie via the incredibly constricted Gaviota Pass, which still looks much like this picture, except that the highway has been expanded by blasting a tunnel through one of the rock walls of this geographical chokepoint. I couldn't help but wonder what it would be like to commute along such a highway for an hour in and an hour back every weekday, especially if several hundred other people are having to make the same commute.

Gaviota Beach, where a towering iron trestle carries the Coast Line over the beach and a long fishing pier reaches out into the Pacific, seemed like a good place to watch the sun set and have a beer, after which it was back to the SB airport for an 8:00 departure. Or so I thought. When I got there, the folks at the United ticket counter, due to some unspecified problem with their scheduled flight, were frantically shunting all their ticketholders over to the American counter for transfer to an earlier flight. Okay. Despite being tagged for "special treatment" by the baggage-searchers, I managed to make the flight, but without a boarding pass for the connecting flight out of LAX.

Fortunately the "Northwest Club" staff at LAX were able to print me one with a minimum of delay, but they quietly made it clear that non-First Class riffraff were not quite welcome there, so I waited among the crowds of people waiting for an Air New Zealand flight.

My plan to sleep on the overnight flight back to Michigan worked about as well as you might expect, and arriving at 5:30 a.m. local time left me about as dazed as you might expect at work the next day... and the next.

And so back to normal. Or what passes for it.