Road Tripping, Part II, the ride home

I have one diversion about our dinner date in Pasadena before heading home the next morning. We walked the neighborhood by the hotel and decided on a tapas bar called BarCelona, clever name, good food. Sat at the bar and quickly figured out it was amateur night...pretty much anyone who just turned 21 or 22 was out on the town hitting all the bars for St. Patty's Day.



Not that there's anything wrong with that, I simply don't recall putting on the green to go bar hopping on a Tuesday night ever.



And it was fun, everyone was having a great time, Paul and I were sucking down some suds and tapas and catching up on the very long day at the show. Then we got a surprise! A very loud surprise. A kilt-wearing-bagpipe-blowing group of musician people marched into the bar and played 3 sets of gawdawful "music". It was ear piercingly loud and horrendous. I'm getting too old for this bar stuff aren't I? Nah, it was bagpipes, you can totally relate, right???!!!



Anyway, next morning we got out of town early, 8:30-ish and got on the road.



Pasadena and the surrounding area is pretty nice, the view of the mountains was incredible and we had no traffic as we left town. There was significant stop and go traffic on the other side of the freeway headed toward Ventura and I was glad I wasn't in it this time.



After The Grapevine, as we headed off the mountain, there was a field full of purple flowers to our left and I could make out the snow capped peaks of the sierra's to my right. There was some overcast haze, looked like residual fog that was clouding the sky, but not too bad. The air quality was definitely a topic of conversation for the entire trip.



I thought I might knit while Paul was driving, but ended up goofing around with both our ipods. I love the new iphone, it's slick. I was able to pull up our route on the google maps and got it to link in to our mobile location. After toying around with that I put it away when I realized I could check email too, but decided not to risk being geeked again. So I sat quietly and looked out at the landscape instead.



There was a rancher rounding up the rams with his pick up truck - don't cowboys ride horses anymore? And we saw a dead and bloated cow in a field. It reminded me of when I lived in Hayward years ago. There was a ranch on Mission Blvd. that had a sign saying they did Livestock Transportation and Deadstock Removal.



I did see a bee-keeper dude today too. He was all beekeeper'ed up in his suit and moving the boxes. As the windshield became more and more splattered with bug guts I wondered if the pollen gatherers binge during bloom time. Some of the splatters were so yellow I had to figure that there was some big time bingeing going on. Or they were yellow bugs (?).



That just about wraps up the road trip part of our travels - I didn't take any pictures, they would have been thru the windshield and it was pretty gross.



The Pasadena -- SJ section was just 5 hours and 8 minutes, not sure of the mileage...Paul wrote it down somewhere.