More Than I Had Bargained for (standard:travel stories, 5424 words)
Author: Rick	Added: Dec 26 2002	Views/Reads: 4065/2664	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
It's about a trip I took last year to southern California (I live on the east coast). It's not a travel guide, or even particularly descriptive of that part of the country, but rather focuses on the situations I found myself in while traveling alone.

More Than I Had Bargained For 

by Richard Shansky 

1. Preface 2. Saturday morning, Crescent Bay Inn, Laguna Beach 3.
Finding San Diego 4. Professional beat 5. Wednesday escape from SD 6. 
Orienting in Laguna 7. Basketball and surf 8. Adam's weekend visit 9. 
The Unexpected, and a change of plans 10. The journey home 

Preface.  Telling others about my plans to go on a solo trip to the
fabled beautiful beaches of Southern California typically elicited 
enthusiastic responses.  However, I generally felt obliged to point out 
that the destination was driven by attendance at a job-related 
conference, and that I had an “old friend” in the area with whom I 
would spend some time.  Somehow, I suspected that the idea of taking a 
solo trip without the wife and child was not conventional enough to be 
justified.  After fifteen years of steady dedication to career and 
young family life, I was looking to just to get away on my own, relax, 
and just maybe, connect with new people.  In retrospect, the 
circumstances I would find myself in could not have been predicted. 

Saturday morning, Crescent Bay Inn, Laguna Beach.  This should have been
the approximate halfway point of this trip.  As it turned out, though, 
it was closer to the end than I could have possibly suspected.  I awoke 
to yet another overcast sky to complement a light drizzle.  (What is it 
with this weather?  I thought this was California; well, it's still 
April.)  Up to this point, I had been following the principle of 
putting the experience of the event before the recording of it.  For 
this reason, I had been delinquent in putting my thoughts and 
experiences into words; also had taken very few pictures.  My solitude 
had afforded me the luxury of time to think and relax, but the lack of 
a travel mate to share the experience with.  The rather disappointing 
weather had to be recognized as an opportunity to put down the words, 
and record the adventure.  Rewind back to the start... 

Finding San Diego.  Ironically, I left Boston on a day when the
temperature reached a California-like 87oC.  All airport connections 
were made without a problem.  The flight was smooth with the exception 
of a brief period of turbulence in which the plane was jolted not once, 
but twice with a magnitude that I had never experienced on any flight 
before.  I impulsively grabbed the seat in front of me out of fear of 
being thrown about the cabin.  Then, the turbulence stopped just as 
quickly as it came.  However, the threat of severe turbulence was now 
well-established.  Fortunately, the landing was smooth and the rest of 
my connections to the Westin hotel in downtown San Diego were also made 
without problems.  I walked around Horton Plaza a bit, but with many 
stores and restaurants closed, I decided to just eat in the hotel's 
sports bar and turn in early in preparation for putting on my Monday 
morning conference face. 

Professional beat.  The two days of the conference consisted mostly of a
series of boring lectures on topics that were only occasionally of 
direct relevance to my job.  As is typical for this type of situation, 
human interaction was fairly minimal; most people were shy about 
extending themselves, even during coffee breaks.  I sat next to a 
pleasant Indian chap from a J&J subsidiary but found his accent 
extremely difficult to interpret.  More than once, I just nodded and 
smiled without really understanding what I was agreeing to.  I seemed 
to have less trouble asking questions of the speakers during the open 
Q&A periods than at previous conferences.  I took this as a sign of my 
advancing professional experience and maturity rather than a release of 
inhibitions about speaking in front of a large audience.  During the 
conference-sponsored lunch on the first day, I sat with three women 
from a small company in Seattle.  They were planning to go to the 
famous Fish Market restaurant that evening for dinner and I was 
half-hoping they would invite me to join them; no such luck.  After 
walking around Seaport Village that evening, I decided to go there 
anyway partially in hopes of meeting them there but also because I knew 
it was a good place to eat and within walking distance of the hotel.  I 
sat in the upstairs “harbor-view” fish bar, by myself, and ordered 
large quantities of beer, sushi, salad and grilled catfish.  I never 
caught sight of them and waddled back to the hotel (later found out 
that they never made it there!). 

As a prelude to the sports-filled portion of my vacation, I went to the


Click here to read the rest of this story (426 more lines)