Getting to Sacramento

Exactly two weeks before my brother and his lady's wedding, our mother did some damage to her ankle. It was at first a sprain that turned into a fracture and consequently ripped her tendons in the area. There are a few gruesome pictures out there capturing the carnage, but I'm choosing to skip posting them here.

I had some time before the wedding, so my brother asked me to come up to Citrus Heights and act as a driver and babysitter of our mom. I said sure.

Having lived away for five years I now cherish my rare chances to be a part of the family, or at least feel like part of it.

Now, my mom's fella also joined her, and as it turned out, my services were not as necessary as it originally appeared.

In any case, my brother found cheap airline tickets to fly from the LBC to Sac direct, a flight that takes something like sixty-five minutes. The Long Beach Airport likes, rather, relishes it's ability to bring people back to the golden age of flight, when you walked along the tarmac and climbed stairs to get into the plane. They have plans to keep that up, to do it indefinitely, which makes flying in and out of there quite the pleasure.

Here's me looking out my window in the last row of the plane:

I'm much more of an aisle sitter, but on this plane I had the entire three-seat row to myself, so I took lots of pictures. Here's one of Long Beach that you'll probably have to magnify to see the skyline in the distance where city meets blue.

Here's the Rancho Palos Verdes peninsula with Catalina Island in the background. The beaches of Torrance, Redondo, Manhattan, and Hermosa are the visible sandy line at the bottom, and maybe even Santa Monica is visible. Getting up high enough...

This picture means more to those who've driven from LA to San Luis Obispo, or the other way. After Oxnard if you're heading "south" to LA, there's a big hill you climb to get to Calabassas and Los Angeles County. if you head the other way, out of LA and on the way to Ventura and SLO, you come down the hill and can see a straightaway stretch of highway that leads to Oxnard and then to Ventura. That's what's visible in this picture: the mountain pass, the stretch, and Ventura shrouded by haze.

After doing some research, I can say that this is Lake Piru, a reservoir caused by damming Piru River.

The patchwork look of the farmland of the California interior always looked kinda cool to me. I especially like the tiny squares of white on the corners of the lots, the farmhouses...

The rivers of the Great Central Valley are easily marked by their dark vegetation.

For some reason, there seems to be a giant hare looping through the airport. I think it looks kinda cool, but what can you do? Is the hare a symbol of Sacramento?

In the days that followed my arrival, I went to a birthday party, a hiking and fishing trip, a minor league baseball game, endless trips to and from the wedding site in Folsom, drunkenly put up a ceiling fan, explored my old elementary school, went on a pre-wedding limousine ride, got some serious preliminary work done on what I'm calling my "Sacramento book" (the fourth in the pipeline), and got to be a part of my younger brother's wedding ceremony. Old friends and family members alike were present, and a grand time was had.

The hard task, for me anyway, is how to tell the story in any semblance of order and how many posts will it cover...I mean, my best man got married, my kid brother, the lad who grew up right next to me, two doors down the hall...the Man.

Dan the Man.