Attention: This post was modified from its original single photograph and a minimal amount of text and updated in November 2022 to represent better what we did over the course of this foggy day.

Another gray day, but who cares? We are out doing stuff in other places, gathering other impressions that can only add to the body of experiences. As I shared in yesterday’s post, this is where we stayed in Artesia, a.k.a. Little India, the Ramona Inn Suites; not the greatest place, but certainly not the most expensive. There’s the added benefit of finding Indian restaurants that serve breakfast.

I guess we’re kind of like land surfers; bad weather’s not gonna stop us from getting out there.

The surfers must have crowded this guy out of the ocean because at the edge of the surf, he came crawling out of his natural environs. Getting him back into the ocean wasn’t easy; in the shallow water the waves just washed him back up on the beach, so we had to ‘as gently as possible’ toss him out there. It worked; he was gone.

Update: Attentive reader Brandon brought to our attention that this little sea creature is, in fact, a “Red Slider” – a freshwater turtle. Now that we have done the equivalent of tossing it into outer space, we can only imagine that something in the deep welcomed this tasty exotic morsel as an imported snack.

I don’t know what brought Caroline and me to Owens-Illinois in Vernon, California, but here we are at the bottle-making factory I worked at for a couple of years, back in 1981 to 1983. It was a hellish place, and in retrospect, most of the people who worked in such conditions were reflecting the dungeon they toiled in. In case I’ve missed sharing it before, my father got me the job here, and it is where he worked the majority of his adult life.

I have some deep nostalgia for the Cinerama Dome because when I went to Hollywood to see a movie on the Cinescope screen in 70mm, I really felt I was going to the movies.

And more nostalgia! Before I could drive, my father and I would come out here to Sunset Boulevard and Horn Avenue for him to look for records. At that time, I hadn’t yet bought my first record, which would happen around 1972 or ’73 when I was still 9 or 10 years old; it was a 7″ 45rpm single of the Rolling Stones’ Jumpin’ Jack Flash, although Child of the Moon turned out to my favorite on that record. On Caroline’s first stop in the United States, I took her to the enormous Tower Records in West Covina, where I grew up, and subsequently, when we came over from Frankfurt, Germany, with four friends in tow to get married, our first stop after double-chili cheeseburgers from Tommy’s was right here at this Tower Records. Sadly, a year after our visit in 2005, they filed bankruptcy, and Tower Records would be no more.

The same can’t be said for Scientology. That’s it; we needed to point the car east and speed off into the desert; our weekend was over.