September 11, 2005 – Going Places and Coming Home

September 11, 2005 – Going Places and Coming Home

It was a week ago today that my wife IM and I returned from our 4-day weekend in Irvine, California. We spent Sunday with our daughter RD and her husband TF and our granddaughter AF and grandson TF, a housewarming for their new place and an early celebration of RD’s birthday. Their home is in a new subdivision on the hills east off the Avenida Vista Hermosa exit from Interstate 5. For the occasion, IM and I went to Costco and bought a 2.5-lb beef tenderloin strip and a couple of bottles of Veuve Clicquot Brut Yellow Label—all great occasions call for bottles of good French Champagne. When we welcomed into our lives our first grandchild EM, we bought a Jeroboam of Bollinger and a larger tenderloin of beef—we had more guests. Our eldest daughter ME and her husband GS—EM’s parents—lived in Costa Mesa back then.

RD and her husband both work in the construction industry, one of the larger employers in Orange County. Land is one of the most valuable commodities in California and one family that owned a great deal of it was the Irvine family. In 1878, James Irvine had amassed 110,000 acres of property in and around the city that today bears his name. The land stretched 23 miles from the Pacific Ocean—stretching from Newport Bay to Laguna Beach up to Santa Ana Canyon and the boundary of the Cleveland National Forest. In 1893, his son, James Irvine, Jr. came into full possession of the property, which he incorporated into the Irvine Company in 1894. RD worked for the Irvine Company shortly after graduating from UC Irvine, which is built on 1000 acres the company donated to the University of California in 1959. The name Irvine goes a long way in Orange County. Today RD works for a small local builder developing land in the Inland Empire—north and east of Riverside and her husband works for a larger builder with developments throughout the southwest. When we get together, the talk is about new developments going up, the price of land in various parts of the state and country, the market for houses, and the latest in home upgrades—granite countertops, marble floors, kitchen and bath fixtures, and all the other touches that make new homes appealing to home buyers.

IM and I have considered relocating to Orange County, which is quite different—far more regimented—from the Bay Area: homeowners’ associations—some communities with more than one, Mello-Roos taxes, postage stamp size home lots, and more continuously busy freeways and concrete and asphalt arteries than you can imagine. We usually experience the freeway lifestyle when we drive down on a Friday before a long weekend. We typically make the mistake of taking Interstate 405 around Los Angeles. In the process, we experience all the chokepoints on the high-speed freeway from Highway 101 south through Interstate 10 to just beyond LAX—the carpool lane is of little consequence because it ceases just north of I-10 until you reach LAX, where it resumes. On the drive down last week we circumvented the snarl by taking Interstate 210 east through Pasadena to Interstate 605 south into Orange County. In Orange County, residents spend a good part of their day in cars—getting back and forth to work and buying the staples needed to get through every day. It’s a place where you drive to exercise, take a walk or go for a bike ride. Northern California is no different, but seems so in that we spend less time driving places during the day—perhaps we drive so much in Southern California because we are not at home.

This trip down we did spend time in a condo we own in Irvine. It’s off I-405 north of the I-5 and I-405 “Y” near Highway 133 on its way to Laguna Beach. The climate in Irvine is similar to Northern California, fog in the morning, turning to a warm summer day by mid-afternoon, giving way to fog in the evening as the on-shore flow from the ocean kicks in. On days when there is a battle between fog and sun, you notice the elevated levels of humidity. Living in our own place did make Southern California seem different to us. We shopped for grocery items at an Albertson’s close by. We picked up household goods at a target two exits north on I-405. We had dinner in a small Italian restaurant near the Target. On Monday after taking a drive down the Pacific Coast Highway and then onto I-5 for a spin back and forth to San Diego, we had an early dinner in San Juan Capistrano at the Cedar Creek Inn just off I-5 west at the Ortega Highway Exit.

Living in a sparsely furnished Condo—bed in master bedroom but little else—was an adventure. We had no television but I had brought along a boom box with radio, CD, and cassette. We listened to music and news from a local PBS station. We purchased a couple of folding chair from Target, the only seats in the condo except for the bed. IM preferred lounging on the carpeted stairs to read. She was determined to get through Kathy Reichs mystery “Monday Mourning.” I had brought along Michael Drosnin’s opus, “Citizen Hughes,” which I read sitting on the floor—I manage to get about a quarter of the way through. Though I had brought along my laptop we were isolated from the Internet because the condo’s telephone and cable service had been turned off a couple of weeks earlier. The laptop’s built in WiFi was picking up wireless networks but wasn’t able to log on and surf the web on someone else’s nickel. What we did do however, was bring along a NetFlix movie, “Bagdad Cafe” and we bought two DVDs at Target “How to Loose a Guy in 10 Days” and “Gladiator.” We watched the NetFlix movie on Saturday night and the other two on Monday, finishing up after midnight and realizing we had an early morning on Tuesday as our daughter RD was stopping by to pick up the key to the condo on her way to work.

We did wake early just before RD arrived, got packed, had the key exchanged, hugged our baby girl—how can she be thirty something—loaded up IM’s car and headed north on I-405. I had driven north from Orange County in early June after driving down in a rental car for a trade show my company participated in. I was a lone commuter then without access to the carpool lane. This time with IM in the passenger seat, the commute should go faster and it did: up I-405 to I-605 north to I-210 and west through Pasadena, which is one of the more confusing roads to drive as you must exit I-210 to remain on the freeway, out of the car pool lane across six lanes of traffic to reach the exit. We managed and afterwards find a completely open road all the way to its terminus at I-5, where we head north through Santa Clarita and beyond to Castaic. From there we head toward Gorman as I-5 climbs over the Tehachapi Range by way of Tejon Pass. When we came down on Saturday Tejon Pass was ablaze with a wildfire that closed the road after we had gotten through. On the way back over the pass, we saw the blackened remains of the fire’s aftermath. The fire seemed to have been contained without affecting the nearby towns of Frazier Park and Lebec.

Once over the pass we headed down the Grapevine toward the restaurants and gas stations at the bottom of the grade. There’s a Denny’s on the eastern side of the Interstate where we stopped for breakfast. It was a little before 11:00 and already it was warm outside as we step out of IM air-conditioned four-door sedan. You can’t complain about a Denny’s meal as you should know what to expect when you go in. We were not disappointed, nor were we surprised. The young girl working the register asked where we were heading. “San Jose,” I replied, “another three hours on I-5.” She asked what the weather was like there. I said, “fog in the morning but hot in the afternoon especially this time of year, much like here.” She replied that she liked the heat, nice and dry so it doesn’t feel muggy. She wished me a good trip and I said thanks. I remember being young once—about her age—and working in a coffee shop near El Paso International Airport. I would watch travelers come and go. I wondered if she felt as I did: how nice it would be to be going somewhere, anywhere other than where I was. Since that time, I’ve been doing a lot of going other places. We were now on our way back on one such and three hours later had returned home.