My Drive Through Coruscant

Yesterday I had a little mini-adventure: I drove to the La Jolla area of San Diego to visit the lovely bloggers kamper and twinklysparkles. They had ventured out of New England in order to enjoy a pleasant November climate - aaah, I'm just teasing.

The drive was interesting. I drove through L.A. basically from top to bottom, which for your reference I have illustrated badly in Paint:

Click to embiggen. I might have exaggerated about Los Angeles's boundary in the south; Santa Ana and Orange County probably aren't strictly L.A. But there was not one quarter-mile of pause in the sprawl during that entire red line. 

And I kept getting in traffic jam after traffic jam. It was not unexpected, but still ridiculous. I also saw a cop swerving back and forth across seven empty lanes of traffic for obscure reasons, I guess in order to slow us all down to 50 mph; I saw a sky that seriously looked like it was on fire, from orange streetlights + craaaaazy fog (that famous San Diego fog...?); and I saw a bunch of our nation's finest driving around in tanks on the vast stretch of land that surrounds Camp Pendleton (aka The Kill-Bot Factory).

Yes, I'm kidding. 100% of my parents were trained as kill-bots. 

I'm pretty sure I saw the boob-towers from The Naked Gun, too, although there was a weird structure in front of them that meant I couldn't get a good picture. One of the funny things about the drive was that it felt deeply weird to be driving south and have the ocean on my right. I'm used to the other coast.

And I saw harbor seals in La Jolla; I've never seen seals outside of a zoo before. That was cool. If you're ever in La Jolla, go to the Cave Store, pay $4, and hear the sea thundering inside a tunnel while you walk down 145 steps to a neat-o cave.

Most fun, I saw twinkly and kamper! I love meeting blog-friends, and this was as terrific as all the other meetings so far have been. They gave me some insight on gender in fiction that I plan to share in Friday's post.

I know there's something else going on in the country right now, but damned if I can think what it is.