We took a little road trip last weekend from the Bay Area to San Diego. After enduring a 9 hour trip to San Diego on Friday (boo to you - LA traffic!) and a much smoother 7 hour trip back on Sunday, here are my top 5* interesting things to see during the car ride:
*Note the Caution: people crossing the border sign (pictured) didn't make my top 5 but it's one of those signs I saw on a previous trip down to San Diego that made me do a double-take. I wonder who designed it.
5. Cows: This is more of a smell situation than something to see. Does anyone else wonder why the cows near Kern County are so close to the freeway? It's not quite the happy cows you see in the commercials.
4. How every city has the same stores at the blah blah Crossing, yada yada Landing or woohoo Center you can conveniently access off the freeway: It must be their mission to have a Lowes or Home Depot, Bed Bath and Beyond, Petco, Toys R Us, Applebees, etc in every city. Forget big business efficiencies and bring back the quaint downtown shops. Or dress these up a little differently in every city. That should be a contest! While I'm on the subject of stores and restaurants, we stopped for lunch at a Subway in Buttonwillow off I-5. About a block away is a Taste of India restaurant. Now I don't know much about Buttonwillow and the traffic along that stretch of road but something way down deep made me wonder how successful a sit-down Indian restaurant would be in an area of fast food restaurants in the middle of nowhere (apologies to the lovely folks in Buttonwillow but it is a lot of nothing all around you). Just call it a feeling. The Subway, on the other hand, had their sandwich assembly line in full effect with a long stream of customers.
3. Crops: There's something mesmerizing when you speed past rows and rows of trees and plants all in perfect alignment. It's even more interesting when you see one person working the fields. Yes, these are the types of things that interest me after staring at a computer screen everyday.
2. Graffiti and Barbed Wire Around Highway Signs: After going to Europe last year, I've developed a fascination with graffiti and the determination someone has to have to want to tag something. It's impressive to see where graffiti pops up. I swear for some of these places, people had to be dangled by rope to reach it. The fact that cities or the state feel the need to put barbed wire around the poles of the freeway signs says a lot. I usually look out for the areas that do the best job of painting over the graffiti with the careful matching of colors to the overpass and blending of the paint. In one area there's a mural with runners on the side wall of the freeway. What a mistake that was! In the future I imagine the process to be much cleaner that instead of people actually painting along the roads, they'd have a graffiti hologram that the city would need to descramble instead of paint over.
1. Other cars & their drivers. There's nothing quite like the sight of a big rig truck passing another big rig truck on a huge hill next to other big rig trucks. There's also the inevitable slow driver in the fast lane holding up 10 cars behind him and the I will get there in my fastest time possible driver that weaves through traffic. There's also the people that don't have a sense of speed and distance and try to past up cars but underestimate their speed and gets stuck behind a truck only to try again in 5 minutes and get stuck behind another truck. These are the things you miss out on when you fly.
I recently caught a few minutes of The Matrix and saw Trinity do some super slow-mo kick butt moves. After watching for a couple of minutes I kept trying to figure out who the actress, Carrie-Anne Moss, reminded me of. I got my answer after watching Lost since Juliet, played by Elizabeth Mitchell, has similar facial features and that slightly sour scowl (just picture her with dark hair). I Googled both of the actresses together and it looks like I'm not alone in the observation. Imagine Trinity in a Dharma suit!
