Back at Work

I’m back in the office. Work is located at a large cubicle farm in what looks like a large warehouse in Sunnyvale. The top managers get offices, which are at the edge of the cubicle farm but inside the building. The executives get window offices along the outside walls. There are about 200 8’x6’ cubicles in the area that I work in on the second of two stories in the building. Everything in the office is colored a different shade of oatmeal.

I just returned from a month long road trip. Well, 2 weeks and then another 2 weeks. The idea was to drive California’s state highway 1 from one end to the other. I did that and then some. Starting from Mountain View I drove down to Santa Cruz and picked up highway 1 north until it ended in the town of Leggett. I continued north to Gold Beach in Oregon. This trip took 2 weeks. You can make the drive in about 20 hours if you take it like a race car driver. If it weren’t for the need for a steady paycheck I could have taken 2 months. Lingered in Eureka for almost a week – I like that town, or maybe just the nice folks there.

One of my rules for traveling is that I do not stay or eat at a place that has a location within 25 miles of where I live. This rules out McDonalds, Starbucks, and Motel 6s. I make an exception for grocery stores – so stopping at a Safeway or 7-11 to load-up on provisions for the drive is OK – although I try to stop at the local stores if I possibly can. This makes for some great discoveries as well as the occasional disaster. Most of the times the disasters are when I find something touristy just off a main drag. When I look for where the locals go it is almost always a winner.

Once back in Mountain View (and after a week of cleaning up the crap that ad piled up at work), I drove to Santa Cruz again and went south this time to Dana Point where highway 1 ends in southern California. Then I continued south on 101 to La Jolla, where I visited my Aunt and Uncle. There I ran out of time, and had to come back from my life of leisure wandering and return to the world of the working. I did drive 5 down through San Diego to the border with Mexico, just cuz, before heading back home to Mountain View.

High point on the trip down south - catching up with my old friend Chrissy. Low point, well there wasn't really a low point (unlike like the northern leg, where there definitely was a low point). If anything, the first day in Santa Cruz. The staring point in Santa Cruz was a bit hard, but that was the whole point of the trip. You see, I recently became "un-engaged" – well, OK, dumped to put it bluntly. I’ll try not to get maudlin about it. This blog is not a whine-fest for poor-old-me, but – for now – this is a big part of who I am and part of what shapes my view of the world. So I’m not going to bury it either. Anyway, Sarah and I used to spend a lot of time in Santa Cruz – First real date, first week-end outing, I even proposed in Santa Cruz. Driving through the town I get this pit in my stomach – even though it has been almost 6 months. Folks say to give it a year. I know that you can’t try to be with someone who wants to be elsewhere. Although, it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier.