Hey there – a little guest post from your favorite Red Neck Faux Bird. 

I had a lovely time exploring Southern California after dropping off Kim at LAX. I promptly made my way down to Long Beach in the famous LA traffic where I ensconced myself at a lovely little RV park right on the water and next to downtown. 

Because I needed to finish out the work week with a number of deliverables due, I kept my head down and my stay was low key. I slept well, took walks, played guitar, and put in long hard Knowledge Worker Days. Found a shop full of absolutely Positive Masculine Energy for a haircut and beard trim and ran a few errands. 

I learned how to use our air fryer a little bit better – it works perfectly fine in the van, but it is easier to set up our little camp table outside where there is an electrical outlet available. I popped the air fryer onto that and tada! It works great, and I have to say that cooking a ribeye steak in that bad boy with just a good coating of salt, pepper, and olive oil… my goodness. I am a total convert. It is fast, easy, and delicious (see the photos). 

I left Long Beach for a stay in Manhattan Beach via a Boondocker’s Welcome reservation. Manhattan Beach itself was stunning – the little downtown and pier are picture perfect Southern California. On my way there I took the van over to Beverly Hills so I could dutifully play my part as a Beverly Hillbilly. I had the pleasure of putting over $100 of gas into the van in Phillips 76 that was Japan-levels of sparkling clean (see pics). I then wandered around the general area of Rodeo Drive and had an incredible Thai lunch at La ong.

I then had a side quest of my own to Norm’s Rare Guitars. Oh lord. I narrowly escaped (yet again) a very expensive impulse buy. Don Musser is one of those “luthier’s luthier” and they had #70 – a dreadnought – for sale. He’s only built about 400 guitars and this one was made in 1985 and it had the absolutely lowest buzz free action I’ve ever seen on an acoustic. If was intoxicating. Oh and also I got to listen to the local 13 year old kid just playing brilliantly right next to me. Yeah, let’s go to LA and Nashville and hang out in guitar shops… you’ll get an attitude adjustment in about 3 minutes. 

After a lovely overnight at my hosts in Manhattan Beach I got up early for a full on tourist day. I went to the Griffith Observatory.  There I spent a few hours hiking the trails down from there into the Hollywood Hills and then spent until lunch time nerding out on the astronomy education there. It was wonderfully done – very inspiring. From there I drove all through Hollywood mostly via the famous Mulholland Drive with the goal of getting to The Getty to look at some art and architecture. That was truly excellent. 

From that point I needed to make my way to Malibu for the rest of my stay. Due to the fires, the Pacific Coast Highway is still closed between LA and Malibu, so I needed to get there by driving through the Santa Monica Mountains. The drive down through Malibu Canyon Road showed large swaths of burns in some areas so you could get a taste of what happened with the fires. Once you got down to the PCH at the point though, things are “normal” as they can be. I was able to get to my spot at the Surf Outpost. 

My goal here in Malibu was to soak up the sun, enjoy the views, and put my head down and do some creative work (we’re figuring out some really interesting product development at work and I have a big proposal I’ve been working on). Malibu was really conducive to this!

The RV park was great. Lots of folks from the Army Corp of Engineers stayed there while working on reopening the PCH. You had the usual tourists like myself, and then you had (at least one) Influencer Couple. I got to watch them do bikini photo shoots and livestream every night (see pics). It was, uh, interesting. 

Probably the highlight was taking a surf lesson. One nice thing about working East Coast hours is that your day is wrapped up by 2pm. So I arranged for a 4pm surfing lesson further down the beach. It was hard! And fun! My instructor was great and towards the end where I’m totally flagging with energy he said, “hey man, just think that you’re learning how to surf in front of James Bond’s house!” And there in front of us, is Pierce Brosnan’s $100,000,000 house. Ok then, noted. 

I spent my last day taking Advil, feeling the limitations of this old man’s body, and happily working on my work proposals. Then it was time to pick up Kim at LAX and prepare for our house sitting gig.