The Flight Back

Because we were going to be getting up early, we slept in the living room and Mike and Joann took the guest room. We set our alarm for 3am.

At the airport, the first security line was closed, and we had to walk across the terminal to find another that was open.

The x-ray security person started sending every bag into the line for extra security checks. He flagged so many bags for extra inspections the line backed up, and we all had to wait. I'd put my razor and trowels aside, so they could look at them without disassembling my bag and when the officer came to inspect my things he looked at them in confusion before handing them over and letting me go.

Finally through security, we discovered our flight was leaving from another gate on the opposite side of the airport. Signs suggested we could take a skytram to get there but all the skytrams were broken, the escalators weren't running, and there was no one around to ask about it because it was only 5am. We ended up walking all the way around the airport to find our gate.

Our layover in LAX was similarly chaotic. Our gate changed to one all the way across the airport, through what felt like an underground basement. At one point we were walking through what looked like a back room through a crowd of construction workers who looked at us like we were idiots for not know intuitively where to go.

On the LAX flight, the woman sat next to me with immaculate nails, a nose ring, and a cowboy hat with painted on burnt highlights, was scrolling through her selfies. She had hundreds. The man in the seat in front of me spent ten minutes swiping over pictures of Taylor Swift at some event with some guy. Just swiping over the same 5 pictures over and over again. Everyone lives in a different world.

Our flight sailed over Monterey and landed in San Francisco. Fortunately we arrived early enough to catch the earlier airbus. It was a 2-hour shuttle back to Monterey. The airbus is $157 per person. Next time we will skip it altogether and look into just flying in and out of Monterey.

I ran into the Trader Joes on the walk back to the apartment to buy cabbage for kimchi, jalapenos for pickling, and lunch meat, but I forgot the milk.

Upon our return we greeted the cat and discovered Amanda's nestbox was crammed with baby titmouse.

Good things about Texas:

Gracious relatives, providing food, board, and conversation. I would not have tried this without them.
The natural environment. Texas is a migration corridor and I enjoyed seeing the range of biomes from deserts, to forests, swamps, and the gulf.
The Houston Audubon society high island national reserves. It's cool to see what happens when an Audubon society has enough money.
Shipley's donuts and kalachis. These are pretty good. It's too bad they're restricted to the Houston area.

Bad things about Texas:

Cars, car infrastructure, and the oil industry. I hate it all so much. Galveston was like a third-world country.
Christian Nationalists, we saw their creepy billboards everywhere.
Rugged individualism and elevated property rights means everyone must own a car and many must commute for hours every day.
Mosquitoes