After again-eschewing a gym trip on Saturday morning in favor of an earlier departure time, Nyet and Beck packed clothes, board games, books, beach blankets, flip-flops, gates and dogs - yep, dogs! - into the Prius and headed toward the place they oughtta be (for Beck's first trip to CA). Beck quite smartly bought a tourist book for SD which proved invaluable, and she also loaded up her iPod with episodes of This American Life, which proved hilarious. The dogs, still recovering from the last time they piled in the car for a multi-hour trip, found the situation dubious. But hanging in the car with those who feed us is preferable to the alternative - being left in the apartment by those who routinely leave us - so the pups hopped in back and settled in. Or, rather, Sparkle settled in, a WD commenced the usual panting / Prius humidor service. First stop: Pet Smart. Why? Because StD had developed the bad habit of licking at her incision scar (from last week's minor surgery). Beck decided to punish the Sparklinator by making her dress like an idiot:
That's the Sparkle monster wearing a little t-shirt that deprives her of access to her upper forepaw, with the added bonus of humiliating her publicly. Beck comes from the tar and feather school of parenting. The shirt says something like "I heart you," which on the surface seems kinda cute, but upon further inspection reveals all kinds of commentary on the inherently obscuring and wasteful act of symbolism. I "heart" you? We've replaced a symbol with a word that has more letters and requires more ink than the original word! Egad. Sparkle nodded smugly and continued to read French philosophy. Wrigley merely looked like her usual uber doofus self:
The car ride to SD, all 5.5 hours of it, was quite pleasant and filled with the stylings of Ira Glass (we went through about 4 episodes on the way up) and a little DJing from Nyet and the infinite iPod. Western arizona is full of desertscape and all kinds of terrifying rock-formation mountains that look like they will collapse onto the road at any moment:
In southeast California there are some huge sand dune parks:
full of RVs and, allegedly, illegal immigrants, the former happily permitted and the latter checked for at various points along route 8. The Beck and I were happily waved through said immigration checkpoints and at the last one, oddly complimented on our "scrappy play" and "Wes Welker-like ability to get open on third down." Huh? Regardless, we thanked our DNA and relative aversion to tanning salons for our quick passage. One bumper sticker we read in this general area read that "America is full." We didn't know that.
Other highlights - people setting their farmland on fire, and a huge set of windmills that had a very Pink Floyd The Wall feel, if Roger Waters had grown up in Southern California (which would have made for some very different emphases in that album, one assumes. The Wall may have fallen via earthquake, for example, and we all would have been spared a lot of psychological drama. And pudding.):
We finally rolled into San Diego and headed toward the beach. En route, we were fairly appalled at how poorly Californians spell:
Tragic. No child left b-hind. Anyhoo, after a long journey and a stop or two at Smackdonalds, we rolled into a parking spot directly outside our Beachside Motel room. Excellent. Beck and I took the pups down to the beach for a double-u, but quickly figured out that a Sparkle in a land of leashless pups is not a serene combo. Took the dogs back to the room, separated them and gave them dinner, and then headed back out ourselves.
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