Palm Springs and Catalina Island
Our trip around the island with the DJ was good. It was really hot and arid inland. You forget this is really not a "lush" island, even though it's an island and there is water visible everywhere . Water is still scarce, since rainfall is very limited, and even the toilets flush with salt water to help prevent droughts. You have to ask for water at restaurants, etc. The terrain was really rocky and hilly, and the Buffalo were just roaming all around, by themselves, but leaving their chips all over the place. At the very top of the island is a small airport. Aparently, the landing strip is really difficult to navigate since it has a really big dip in it, then it just ends at the edge of the cliff and there have been a number of plane crashes because of the precarious runway setup. We got a nice little tour of the airport, ate a good cookie, and resumed our trip. The coast view is beautiful. It's easy to forget that LA is only a few miles away, really. There is a tiny little hamlet with only 200 residents on another narrow part of the island called "Two Harbors." The town is strange, though, since it is specifically run by a company which was started by Mr. Wrigley, but is no longer controlled by any Wrigley, and operates the Land Trust to which 90% of the island belongs, and is only open to fishermen who actually work for the company. It's so strange. 9% of the island is this company's property, the town included, and only 1% of the island is open for private ownership. There are a series of very luxurious condos near Avalon in a cove which are owned by this company, and people like Barbara Streisand have homes there. Just the association fees per month are thousands. I can't even imagine.
We were experiencing unseasonably warm weather, even for Catalina, and temps in the daytime were in the high 80's to 90's. This was probably due in large part to the fires going on in SoCal, even the air when we were high up on the island was smoky and you could actually see ashes littering the boardwalk even on Catalina.
At night we all went to a cute Italian restaurant for dinner, and it was just really cute. The food was really good, although I had eaten just earlier so I wasn't ready for dinner with mom and pop. The place was painted with scenes from Italy and the countryside, the proprietress was a thin, Italian woman who was very gracious to us, giving her reccomendations to mom and dad. Mom and I split a carafe of wine, and I ate little tastes of their dinners, which they really loved, and they even topped the meal off with dessert. We had a great time. it was such a cute place, right on the main avenue in Avalon. Lit with little cristmas lights all over.
Mom was telling us from day one that she was going to parasail while we were there. I love that she wanted to do this, she's funny. I had this talk with Al about our mutual preferences for hobbies, and we discovered that while Al wanted to do things that involved air, I liked to do things that involve the ground or being under it, like diving. Mom is also an air person, much to my surprise. She's funny, and I remember having a conversation with her while she was visiting me last year about how she's always wanted to hanglide. I was totally shocked, it's something I never imagined mom would want to do that. The conversation was kind of illuiminating, and it really got me thinking about her as a person since then. She loves to fly. She loves to fly in planes. I remember her having a dream where she was flying once when I was a kid, and telling me about it in the morning. How she's had those before and she just loves them so much she never wants to wake up. Combined with the urge to parasail and hanglide, post-therapy Shelby has pieced together a small picutre of mom and her psyche. Sometimes in life, things are so bad around us that we escape to happier places. Dreams of flying have always been associated with happiness, and weightlessness, which is a metaphor for the crosses we all must bear in our lives being relieved for us by simple gravity. I wonder about the converseness of my feelings, where I like to actually feel smothered. I like to be in closed, tight spaces and open expanses make me feel unsettled, I like the feeling of weight, temporally and probably psychologically, and I think the added pressure of being underwater is part of the main attraction for me, enough to overcome a deeply entrenched fear of sharks. I'm starting to sound like Milan Kundera, but really, ever since I read the Unbearable Lightness of Being, I realized I was a "heavy" person. Partial to weight and smothering. Some people want to escape and be free. they're the fliers.
Speaking of fliers, we signed mom up the next day for her sail. She did great. We heard about the captain of the boat, who is an honest-to God best man you've ever looked at kind of guy. He really looks like Brad Pitt. Everything we hear about him before still didn't do him any real justice. unfortunately, he didn't look at my camera enough for me to get a "real" face-forward shot. That aside, mom was amazing. They put you in this harness thing, and you never have to touch the water, you just go right up and come back down on these cables, and the parasail itself never touches the water. It's really cool. She looked so calm the whole time, and I really expected a lot of screaming while she was up there, but once she was up, she just kept smiling and looking around her. I remember thinking how happy this must make her feel, as a flier.
That night we said goodbye to Connie in the liquor store where she worked, thanked her for her hospitality and the trip vouchers, and traded email adresses. I really liked her. Her and Dad were just such perfect diving buddies. It was great. She's so sweet. I haven't heard from her since then, and that surprises me. I was so sure she'd email. I wish I'd taken hers.
We ate dinner in a more "local" place up the road from avalon called the Buffalo Nickel. We had HUGE meals for "cheap" prices (at least on Avalon!) and the food was good. At night, we retired to our separate oceanview rooms at the Hotel MacRae and rested. I was a little restless so I took a night wander around the streets, but came home to watch more discovery channel before falling off to sleep.
