Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Trips & Travels, Vol II

Ok, I said I'd be back and here I am. Back. As anyone who follows me on Twitter knows, I have been feasting on tomatoes from my mom's garden, cottage cheese, tuna & crackers for lunch today, and all the rest of this week as well. It is the Patsy-Lunch-Special; my mother ate this lunch many, many days of her own boring office job. It's pretty tasty. Also sounds like diet food from the 70s.

I mentioned in the last post that we stayed in a cheap motel on the first night of our PCH adventure; this was not our intention, mind you. Brandon and I are Cheap Ass Travelers; we will only accept The Worst & Thriftiest in terms of lodgings, and we had (sort of) planned to camp out on these first two nights on the road. I had, in fact, reserved campsites at our two post-wedding destinations, but since Brandon seemed to be non-committal in the way of making definite plans, I decided to hold off on reserving anything for our two nights in the Big Sur area. I said to myself "Be cool. Adapt your husband's lassiez-faire attitude! Take that stick out of your ass and GO WITH THE FLOW." Well, what you don't find out when you don't plan is that both the private and public campsites in areas as spiritually rich as the one we were in? Those campsites fill up 6 months in advance. So instead of pitching a tent, we drove inland until we found a little independent crappy (but not scary) motel room. We took possession of a room with two Queen beds with the understanding that we could only use one bed and receive a reduced rate; however, B was so tired that when he got in bed with a dinky plastic cup of Shiraz, he promptly fell asleep, leaving an enormous crimson stain on the blanket and sheets. (Please comment with joke about broken hymen. I am too boring to think of one right now).

So we drove back down the coast the next morning, everything was as beautiful as the day before, plus there was a gathering of folks with classic cars that were driving down CA 1 in spurts that day. I am talking 1930s' Rolls Royces, not 1960s' Mustangs. I kept having the spooky feeling I had somehow been transported into The Great Gatsby, and kept checking the highway for the corpse of Myrtle. All along the cliffs there were gorgeous homes and the mere sight of them made me want to vomit with jealousy. (For some reason, on this trip, beauty kept inspiring me to vomit/piss/shit myself, which B found odd. After reading a Pablo Neruda poem to him in the car, I said "GOD, this just makes me want to murder someone!" which he found equally strange).

We stopped in the woods and sat on lovely, large Adirondack chairs that were in the middle of the Big Sur River, drinking coffee and taking pictures. We hiked on a couple of trails, and on our way down South stopped at the Julia Pfeiffer Burns state park, where there is a waterfall that pours into the ocean. Let me stop right now and reiterate: there is a motherfucking waterfall pouring into the motherfucking ocean. Once again, I fought off the urge to crap myself and soldiered on. We spent that night inside another cheap motel (I believe it was the Holland Inn in Morrow Bay, CA); I remember that this one had a really skanky throw pillow on the bed, and a dramatic picture of a single red rose on the wall, the kind of print that you can win at the fair if you're lucky.

We trucked ourselves back down to Orange County for the beginning of the pre-wedding festivities without incident, having some particularly tasty fish tacos in Santa Barbara on the way down. (Fish tacos may be the culinary highlight of the trip. I love you, fish tacos! You never do me wrong like warm rum in a hot tub!) Somehow, despite the snail-like pace of traffic in Los Angeles, we arrived back at our lovely sis-in-law's family's home right on time. Her family was just as wonderful, hospitable & sweet as our sis-in-law, E, is. They made us feel so welcome and just like we were part of their family, and it made the whole weekend so nice & easy.

Let me pause my already long as hell trip story to explain a little bit about my brother & sister-in-law, G&E. They are just a little bit younger than us, and we all get along really well. They are also big Avett fans so we usually try to go to shows together if it's geographically convenient, and in the past couple of years Brandon has grown really close to his brother, so we try to get together as often as possible. They are both smart, funny, and cute; they're like Brandon and I... only better. By better, I mean that E never says the C word like I do, and G doesn't harshly confront people about politics. Also, they eat less and exercise more than us. However, they love & accept us anyway, and through them I am experiencing the kind of sibling relationships I never even realized I longed for; we are family and we are friends, it's great.

We camped out in a dry creekbed the Friday night before the wedding (which was Monday afternoon) with a big group of G&E's friends, which included a large contingency from Bowling Green, KY, where they both went to college. We drank and ate cookies and saw a tarantula and I introduced the ladies to the amazing P-Style. Thanks to it, I indeed peed in style during all camping excursions. We spent the weekend hanging out with all kinds of friends and family, drinking at night with B's cousins that I was too much of a Frantic Southern Bride to hang out with during out wedding. They are all as cool and weird as I would expect anyone who shares the Dill bloodlines to be.

Monday morning we woke up and B dropped me off at the wedding site, where I helped E's mom & family do wedding prep. I was really happy to do this, because I feel like I have wedding karmic debt to pay off from all the fine ladies that helped my mom and I when we got married. They got married in a park overlooking the ocean; it was a really relaxed & sweet site. E's mom is the workingest work machine that I have ever met and was literally decorating and preparing 35 minutes before the wedding. She had to be shooed down to the hotel, where I watched her fix her hair, get dressed, and sew a panel on her dress in like 20 min. It was awesome.

So then they got married and everyone cried and I was so, so proud of them. I don't know why that's how I felt, I guess it's just so nice to see two people who you know are making the right decision. It's not like that at every wedding you go to, you know? And, as B said in his wedding toast, I think that we're just so excited that they're together and we get to share our lives with them, and someday our kids will grow up together. (I'd like to request a simultaneous awwww right now).

Still to come: canyons, panting, wading, (actual) camping, driving, driving driving!

3 comments:

Stacey Greenberg said...

the pstyle! who knew??

sounds like a great trip. i'm j.

Bette said...

Oh, keep it coming! I'm thrilled for for E and G.

patricia said...

never knew about the p style! i will have to get one pronto! until i saw this, i thought i was a smarty pants because i don't wear pants hiking/camping in warm weather anymore, so i can pee standing up.

 

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