Fill In The Blanks

March 4, 2009 - I can't sleep this morning so I got up and looked back at the blog and the trip pictures and realized that I forgot to blog about some things that happened while in Hermosa. After waking up Sunday and getting breakfast with Sarah's parents we headed back down to Hermosa for half a beach day. The weather had been very good that weekend (mid 70's and sunny) so we wanted to try and get some beach time in. UT had told me that in each of the last 4 years he has been in LA that at some point between Feb 1 and Mar 30 the Santa Anna winds blow west (I assume it is west/south) out of the desert and deliver hot air to the LA area. Unfortunately we didn't get the high 80's - 90's weather that comes with the Santa Anna winds but we did get enough warm air for me to decide it was time to go swimming in the ocean. I don't think the trip would have been complete without the dip.

The next sequence of pictures is pretty goofy but you have to remember that the water is about 54 degrees and the air temperature is about 72 and breezy.

Thinking about it.....

Going for it.....

Getting the hell out of it....

We last about 15 seconds in the water. Sarah and Mark had both said that the water is so cold at first that it knocks the air right out of you, I did not believe them. Most of the nights we stayed in Hermosa we walked down to the pier at sunset with beers to enjoy the view. I said that I would like to jump off the end of the pier and swim in. Sarah told me that I would almost certainly drown from the cold water sucking the air out of me. Honestly I thought I could do it until I ran into the water with Mark and realized how right she was. I was completely zapped form the shock to my system and DEFINITELY would have drowned had I tried to swim any where. All that said the dip was amazing and totally worth it. It is pretty cool that on this trip I have snowshoed, skied, hiked, biked, roller bladed, swam, and driven over 5,000 miles.

That Sunday night we tried to get ticket to the Comedy and Magic Show. This place is pretty famous because Jay Leno got his start as a comedian there. He made a promise to the owner of the club that if he made it big he would come back EVERY Sunday night and perform stand up and he was true to his word. Typically the tickets sell out weeks in advance so we went down to the club at 4:30 to put our names on the wait list. We were the 3rd party in line and thought we had a pretty good chance. They tell you to come back at 6:30 when they start calling off names form the wait list. Obviously only the first two parties got let in because the club was over sold due to GQ Magazine doing a special on Jay and his continued loyalty to the club.

Regardless I got a few pictures of Jay and his buddy pulling up to the club. As I am sure most of you know Leno is a car and motorcycles collector. His collection is supposedly very large and ranges across all era's. On this night he showed up in his 1955 Buick and the car was in PERFECT condition. It was pretty cool and Jay was really good to all the people who wanted to take photographs and get his autograph. I respect the guy a lot more after seeing him do what he did.

After the comedy show thing didn't work out we went back to Mark and Megan's and they made us a fantastic send off dinner and we hung out. Megan took this last picture. The Three Musketeers.

Hope all are well.