(Reprise) It's not a vacation until you...

-

Lose count of how much plastic surgery you see within five minutes of arrival at LAX. Help your host select a lemon tree at Home Depot on the way to Palmdale. Kiss two months of sobriety goodbye with some margaritas. 

Split a bottle of wine after the margaritas and paint each other’s toenails. Go out for Mexican food after you should be passed out in bed. Spend the next morning touching up the errors in your toenail polish. Celebrate a friend’s return to the States over beers and half a tri-tip sandwich in San Louis Obispo. Have more beer and take a nap with The Who. 

Let everyone sleep in your hotel room because theirs is just too scary. Go wine-tasting in a limo with a stripper pole. 

Learn how to properly sniff wine, but don’t get frustrated when you can’t tell the difference in any of them. Drink a $150 wine without swirling or sniffing. Vogue in front of a boxcar. 

Take a nap in broad daylight while a party rages around you. Learn the hard way that there are no cabs available in Paso Robles on Wine Festival night. 

Sleep in the top bunk of an Angry Birds bed. Drive a red camaro through Paso Robles… at 25 mph. Recall that the other half of that tri-tip sandwich is still in your hotel fridge and eat it cold for breakfast. Drink mimosas on the back patio with new friends. Unexpectedly check off a bucket list item by driving along the Pacific coast. 

Have dinner with one of your closest friends from the east coast in a Ventura tap house. Take a Pilates class that your sister is teaching, and pretend to not be afraid that she’s going to kick your ass. Assume you’re suddenly an expert in wine-tasting and compare two bottles of wine using words like “notes”, “mellow”, and “finish”. 

Sit on the patio with sister, friend, cats, and lemon water and do absolutely nothing except contemplate the rate at which your skin is burning. Tiptoe into the Pacific Ocean and try not to be surprised by the fact that it feels at least 40 degrees warmer than the Atlantic. 

Ignore no less than a dozen “doctors” in Venice Beach who try to sell you medical marijuana. Lose your voice because you've been laughing for a week straight.

End the week with a good bottle of wine, sniff in all three places, and finally smell the difference.





Enough wine drinking.  Now I'm switching to the moonshine.

Popular posts from this blog

A donut would have been nice.

-
Image
“Can I give you a hand with that?” said the man in the liquor store parking lot. I wish I had known that that would be the last time I heard those words all night. I was standing there in the cold rain, wearing a dress, heels, and wool overcoat. I was a half-mile from my house, stopping for a bottle of wine because I knew I was going to need it. I didn’t want to deal with my evening’s project in my work clothes, so I planned to go home and change into a raincoat and grubby jeans first.  “No, thank you sir,” said I to the kind man. “I live down the street, so I’m just going to take it home.” I drove home, slowly and carefully, on a very flat tire. My mind and body had kicked into what I call “survival mode”. I recognized it immediately, because it wasn’t so long ago the last time it happened (the Derecho /epic power outage/absurd heat wave/car crash of June 2012). I was starving, and I’m pretty sure I had to pee, but I forgot to deal with either basic function because I was foc...
Read more

Stuck in the Middle With[out] You.

-
Image
My phone rang at 2:00 am on a Saturday morning. Rather than being alarmed, I pulled myself out of sleep and reached for it. I didn't even look at the number; I already knew who it was. “Hey,” I answered in my raspy, middle-of-the-night, just-woke-up-from-a-dream-about-you voice. My inflection was deliberate. Perry and I, we’d done this a million times. “Hi, honey,” I heard on the other end. I felt prickles through my arms and legs. Not at all the voice I was expecting. “Oh, hey Rob,” I replied as casually as possible despite the fact that my heart was exploding with every beat. If Rob knew I was expecting a call from another man at this time of night, especially Perry, he would flip. Rob knew that Perry and I had a past, so he assumed that Perry and I also had a present. The truth was that the present was nothing more than witching-hour phone calls that often wandered towards sunrise. Perry and I had a close bond. Nothing wrong in my book, but Rob’s book was much diff...
Read more

Boomerang

-
Image
I heard the thumping bass as I drove past the place. The building looked like it was once a house, one of those depression-era homes with two stories, no shutters, and white siding that was scuffed with dirt and mold. It was the kind of place that didn't even look like a destination, just another house along a row of buildings that looked exactly the same, except for a small square sign hanging over the front door. Five blocks away, I found a parking space. In an attempt to remember which old, white house my car sat in front of, I tried to count my steps. I lost track when my cowgirl boots kept slipping in the snow that still covered the sidewalks. It had been more than 24 hours, why hadn't the neighbors bothered to shovel yet? I could smell cigarette smoke oozing from the place. Crap, I thought, it’s been years since I've been to a bar where smoking was still allowed. I should have left my coat in the car. And my scarf. And my boots. And myself,  ...
Read more