rambling about town

Orange County is a strange place. I don’t really know why on a conscious level, it’s just like every place else, with the same chains, traffic, rude people, the same sun and sky as anywhere… but it feels strange to me, much stranger than NC ever did. I guess it might be partially an East Coast/ West coast cultural thing, but maybe that is in my head. Maybe I just want it to be strange and different to make it more exciting. Sigh. I feel like I can’t put how I feel into words and that is frustrating.

Jef got his school money and I have a lead on a job, so that is good news on the money front. We still aren’t exactly going to be living it up here for the next few years, but we’re still having an adventure nevertheless.

We drove into LA over the weekend to see Holly and Jesse, friends of Jef who were only in town for the day since Holly was moving to Atlanta. Afterwards we drove up into the Hollywood Hills and enjoyed the views from Mulholland Drive. It’s my favorite place to go in LA, the cliffs are so high and the view is gorgeous.

I was going to upload some pictures, but my iPhone ate them. Damn you technology!!!

 

This is where I live now

Now that I have finally recovered my senses after three weeks of travel and moving, here are some pictures I took during our first two days here. Chapman University, Old Towne Orange and the beach.

 

Signs

There are lots of cool old signs like this all over OC, I will post some more pictures of those later.

 

Disneyland

We were exhausted from lugging our meager possessions up to our 3rd floor apt so we decided to take a break after lunch and drive the 10 minutes to Disneyland. We did it just because it’s sort of awesome to be able to drive to Disneyland on a whim. Unfortunately you can’t see much of the park from the road and you have to pay to go in of course but in my book it’s still awesome.

 

Our new pad

We moved in to our new apartment today, in a complex called Villa Santana. It’s pretty nice. There is always the sound of kids playing here and a cool breeze. We have a 2 bed 2 bath apartment with a vaulted ceiling in the living room. There is a pool as well which I am looking forward to using. Best of all we are paying only $1200 a month, which believe me or not is pretty cheap for this area.

 

We made it from end to end

We finally drove to the beach yesterday evening. It was very cool, breezing, and the water was cold. Still people braved the surf and the kids would run away screaming. I didn’t go swimming but I waded a little. I hope the water isn’t always this cold!

After our foray into the ocean we ate at an excellent Thai restaurant that heaped our table with food. For $10 apiece we had soup, salad, appetizers, an entree, TWO desserts, and unlimited Thai iced tea. I was in heaven.

 

We have arrived!!

We made it to Orange around 4:45 local time. We are exhausted but we can’t really rest until we find a place to live. Still I think we will take it easy tonight and start in earnest tomorrow.

 

Twentynine Palms

I didn’t count to see if there were actually 29. In addition to the fine establishment pictures there is also a Combat Barber II Marine Haircut down the road as well as Tami’s Civilian and Marine Haircuts.

 

On the road to California

This is the last official day of our roadtrip, we are driving the last 300 miles or so to Orange. We are taking a route that avoids I-40, so that means trekking through some seriously dry, jagged, moonlike desert. We noticed many abandoned motels and restaurants along what used to be route 66, until it was bypassed by I-40. There are also alot of names and other graffitis spelled out in rocks along the roadside.

 

Laughlin NV

We stayed here, our last stop before Orange CA, because one of the casinos was willing to give us a room for $21 for one night. There is little else to recommend Laughlin – it is basically a strip of casinos on the river across from Arizona.

At least Jef got to try In-N-Out for the first time, and he liked it. Also, when I went out to walk along the river there were at least 5 baby skunks wandering around on the rocks by the water. I don’t know how it happened but they sure looked confused.