A Mini Vacation

 Here's the latest progress on the new piece. I was having a little too easy of a time with this one, so I had to make my life difficult. I accomplished that by making a through-cut in the middle of the inside of the figure.

It's going to mean a lot of slow work in a confined space. I'll manage.

 

The I-5, Santa Ana Freeway, is the gateway to the 101 Northbound  through downtown Los Angeles. It sucks. Getting to the Santa Ana Freeway has always meant a miserable drive down Imperial Highway. Google maps insists that the closest route from our house to the Santa Ana is by going down Mills Avenue to Florence. I've lived here since forever, but I never went that way. Turns out Google maps is right. It's strange how difficult is was to force myself to take a "new" route. It just felt wrong. Odd way to begin a vacation.

But I wanted to go back to Art City Studios up in Ventura, and the only way to get to Ventura is to get on the 101 freeway. I have two stones to go from the first batch of five that I bought last September, and I wanted to get more before Art City has to close, or move. The property on which Art City sits has been sold to a Los Angeles developer. Old story here in California.

 

Ventura is not quite a hundred miles north of here, but fifty or more of those miles are through seriously shitty traffic. 

The last time Mary and I went up there I got stone in the early afternoon, and then we went up to Ojai for lunch before driving back. Bad mistake. It took almost four hours to get home. This time I figured on powering out of the house about three thirty in the morning, so I could get my business done and get back when the traffic wasn't so heavy. 

 

But Mary suggested we make an overnight trip out of it this time. What about the cats? What about the expense? Mary assured me that the cats could survive a little over twenty four hours in the house alone. She also reminded me that it's been forever since we got out of the house for an overnight date.

So we went first class, and  reserved a hundred dollar room at the Motel 6 rather than the bargain basement  eighty five dollar room at the Sandflea Inn. We hit the road just after ten Wednesday morning, and got into Ventura around half past noon. The guy at the motel let us check in early.

 

I've been housebound for too long. Being in Ventura felt like we were seriously out of town. Mary and I made like tourists, walked down to the beach, and had a mediocre lunch on the pier. I (former surfer) went old man style, and walked on the beach with my shoes on. 

Later on we had a very expensive good dinner beachside, and watched the sun set from the end of the pier.

 

Mary and I are serious coffee drinkers. It was one of the first signs that we were going to be compatible- we both loved the bean. Usually we spend over an hour in the morning sipping our way to consciousness. But we were in a Motel 6. It was a little after four in the morning. Neither of us slept well. The days of free weak coffee in the motel lobby are gone the way of eight track tapes.   Starbucks didn't open until five o'clock, and it was more than a mile away, all uphill from us, and no parking near Main Street. Mary is seventy three, and I'm sixty nine. We hiked. Starbucks wasn't yet open when we got there, but there was some crazy woman at the door, yelling at someone who wasn't there. Nothing was going to stand between us and caffeine. We got our stash, and found a quiet place to sit in the deep overcast. We finished our coffee, and took a slow walk past the antique stores, and down to the Mission San Buenaventura, founded in 1782 by Father Junipero Serra. The lights were on. Mass held at 7:30 in the morning.

Soon enough the first restaurants on Main street opened up, and we got breakfast.

We got to Art City just as they were opening up. The place makes me feel like a kid in a toy store. I could go nuts buying stuff. They had orange calcite in huge translucent slabs. It's beautiful material,but that's strictly power tool territory. I was going for three, or maybe four chunks of alabaster in the 50-80 pound rage. I ended up with seven stones for a total of just under four hundred pounds.

 There's some really beautiful material here. Should be enough to keep me going for well over a year.