I found my way out of LAX and onto the 405 South. I was headed towards Long Beach and down to Ocean Blvd to the Hilton there. The hotel was really nice and had a massive lobby area. If you like sitting on stylish furniture in rooms with 30 foot ceilings then you would've liked this place. I had a room on the top floor, #15 with a good view, although this area is mostly industrial with lots of cranes and shipping containers.By the time I got ready for dinner all the restaurants were closing and it was only 9:30. I found a Sports Bar and Grill and had some Mac 'n' Chicken, it was OK.Sunday morning I woke up at 7:30 CST which was 5:30am in my room and couldn't get back to bed. I watched some TV and killed time until 11 and headed out for lunch and the beach. When I walked out to the valet stand there was a rolling luggage bag on the ground alone. I handed my ticket to the valet and he retrieved my car. I placed the bags I needed in the car and some towels and such in the trunk. After lunch, I got down to the beach and opened the trunk. I noticed a strange bag in there but for some reason it wasn't strange enough for me to investigate. I grabbed the towels and went to get me a strip of beach going. (Travis, that's for you!) The sunshine on the west coast in southern California is warm but it is countered by the wind which averages out the temp to about 75 degrees. It's fantastic weather until about 6pm when the sun gets lower in the sky and the temp drops into the 60s. About an hour of being lazy on Long Beach and I was ready for a change. I drove up the 405 towards L.A. and then headed down to Redondo Beach. Walking along the boardwalk, I found enough ice cream stands to satisfy a thousand kindergarten classes and for some reason people here really like chocolate covered frozen bananas! Picture this, you're standing in an open area surrounded by people you don't know and 1 out of 10 are eating a chocolate covered frozen banana. For me, California is the only place I've witnessed this.
Back to the part about the strange luggage. I finally get back to the hotel around 6pm and as soon as I walk in the room the phone is ringing. No one knows which hotel I'm staying at so I can't imagine who is calling me. I answer and its the front desk. They ask if I noticed a strange bag that may have been placed in my trunk. I laughed and said yes and told them that I had just given the car to the valet and they could retrieve the bag. Poor guy, I had his laptop and briefcase for over 6 hours. I'm sure he wasn't happy with the valet dude!
Monday morning I was up and off to Pico Rivera, a town just east of L.A. where one of our Peterbilt dealerships is located. I got there about 8:30 and found the crew of guys who were out replacing PCs. I met the GM for that store as well as the Regional GM and spent some time with them to make sure any issues that may currently have were being handled. I was able to round up a golf game and later that afternoon we headed back down to Long Beach to play at a nice city course there. At $25, it was quite a bargain, the carpet like greens were so plush, something I'm not used to in the blazing heat of Texas. I placed my clubs on the cart next to Pete Davis' and ironically my LSU Tiger head cover sat starting at his stuff USC Trojan head cover. We didn't talk about the season at all nor did we fight over who REALLY won that year. I drove the ball extremely well, finding the middle of the fairway on about 9 of the 14 driving holes. Putting was a different story as the soft greens were hard to read and hard to adjust to. I missed more 3 footers than I normally do but I walked away with an 85.
Tuesday morning I was off to LAX by 7:30 for a 9:25 flight. I filled up the tank of the rental car with $3.19 87 octane regular unleaded. Since I had changed my flight to return to San Antonio instead of Austin I wasn't able to Check In online and therefore ended up with a C boarding pass. (Southwest uses A, B and C groups for boarding, A is good, B is ok, C sucks!) I ended up sitting next to a mother and daughter who were both of reasonably small size so I was able to use my own armrests and not feel crowded. I'll land around 2pm in San Antonio and head into the office for a short afternoon of work. Back to the real world in the morning. It was a fun, golf-filled vacation. I made some new friends, have a standing invite to a USC game and got to play golf in California.
I'm off to NYC in 15 days.
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