Merry Christmas! If I'd been travelling with someone other than my father, I would have made a real effort to put something Christmassy on the agenda, but I knew he wouldn't care and it was better just to leave it alone. But I did wish him "Merry Christmas!" when we got up. And we called …
Continue reading West Coast Road Trip, Day 10: Santa Cruz to San Francisco
This day was kind of a bust, unfortunately, except it still met the baseline of 'hey, new places to see' and 'let's putz around doing fun things'. Got up, got cleaned up, got the inn's free continental breakfast. Headed out. It was raining pretty hard. We went to the drugstore, then the gas station. Dad …
Continue reading West Coast Road Trip, Day 9: Monterey to Santa Cruz
Woke up in San Simeon, absolutely beautiful day, not like the day before. Had breakfast at the hotel's restaurant, same place we had dinner. Packed up and off to Hearst Castle. They offered several tours, but made it clear that the basic tour (the "grand rooms") was the easiest in terms of stairs - but …
Continue reading West Coast Road Trip, Day 8: San Simeon to Monterey
Morning: we got up, packed. Dad was a little light-headed, due to his blood pressure meds. (oh, good, another medical thing we have to worry about - but he just stopped taking that one med and was mostly fine thereafter). I went down to the cafe and got him a bagel and me a breakfast …
Continue reading West Coast Road Trip, Day 7: LA to San Simeon
This was our last full day in Los Angeles. We had several museums still undone, but basically decided to do one thing today. We chose the Autry museum. I also wondered if there was such a thing as a driving tour of LA sites, and a little internet research showed there was, led from an …
So... first thing when we got up was 'how did you sleep?'. He actually slept OK, although had to get up probably to use the bathroom and take more Tylenol. But once we had coffee in hand, the big discussion was "do we pull the plug on the trip or not"? Dad was feeling pretty …
So, this is the bad part - the thing that I was very worried about actually happened. My dad got injured while we were traveling. So we'd decided on a dinner restaurant, but I really wanted to walk by the (close by) laundry place to see if we drop off laundry there and get it …
Continue reading West Coast Road Trip, Day 4, pt. 2: Crunch!
We were now getting into our start-of-day routine. Coffee and cleanup in the room. Then breakfast at the self-serve hotel buffet, $30 a pop! But pretty good. Headed out to Paramount Studios for the tour, which was great. Parked in the visitor's lot (another parking charge), then across the street to a check-in and waiting …
Another morning waking at 315, drowsing until 6. Got up, showered, packed. Dad didn’t want breakfast yet, but we did finally get his laptop up and running. [rant omitted about how he uses too many passwords and forgets them]. He putzed around online while I finished up. Rolled our luggage down the endless carpeted hallway, …
Continue reading West Coast Road Trip, Day 3: Vegas/Los Angeles
Still on EST, we both woke up at 300, but fell back asleep. By the time it was 600, I’d figured out what to do. Went down to the Starbucks in the casino to fetch coffee. By the time I'd gotten back, Dad was dressed and raring to go with the day. I was like, …
