Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

I slept pretty well. Three cheers for my custom-fit earplugs. We had breakfast at the only Yelp four-star rated place in Santa Maria. Let's just say that rating criteria differ.

At breakfast we discovered that Chuck's hacked iPhone was constantly rebooting itself. It wouldn't even get past the Apple logo screen. Unfortunately, he was supposed to stay with his sister tonight, and her phone number was stored in the phone. Oops. He installed the Facebook app on my phone and sent his roommate a message asking him to turn his Mac at home on, so he could grab a backup off it.

The ride down was pretty, in the various California ways. First dry grass and scattered trees, then a mountain lake (We took CA 154 past Lake Cachuma, instead of the 101), and then a nice Pacific coast segment.

We reached Lifto's place around 12:30, and Chuck started transferring his phone backup to my Mac while we went to lunch at a great French restaurant in Venice and Lifto told us a bit about the area (canals? who knew?). It would be nice to spend some time there just hanging out.

Sarah met us at the restaurant and gave us a lift back to their place where we found that Chuck's download was complete and that Aeris the Silken Windhound had eaten my headphones. Of course, they're a weird kind that nobody stocks, so I ended up going to the Apple store, looking at what they had in the same line and then just picking up some Sony ones. The trip was only a couple miles, but it took much longer than it should have because of traffic.

by the time I returned, Chuck had a semi-working phone (good enough to get at his address book, but not enough to make calls), so he borrowed another phone to call his sister.

We ended up leaving Venice about, oh, 4 hours after we had originally planned, but it was a pretty quick ride down to San Diego. The FasTrak electronic toll collection down here operates without even slowing down, and the lanes are well separated from the normal lanes, so there aren't people cutting across four FasTrak lanes to get from one of the cash lanes to another like there are on the Bay Bridge.

I managed to have my low fuel light come on square in the middle of a 20mi stretch with no services at all (much better than at the beginning...), so I hit a new record: 177.3mi on a tank (with at least .064gal left over!). I hope this pattern continues.

I dropped Chuck at his sister's place in Pacific Beach and continued down to Ocean Beach to hang out with Daniell. She fed me a lovely dinner and then made taste test the chocolate chip muffins she'd just finished baking.

GPS track: Day 2 290 mi