My IMBC Fate Sealed On a Technicality, How to Spot a Tourist, and NorCal Trip, Day 1 (Burn, Baby, Burn!)

D’oh! What a way to bust out of the IMBC! Darn Blogger and their timestamps!

Oh well, I’m rooting for fellow newcomer Amy to win!

- How do you spot a tourist? Well, if you’re a NorCal’er, and you see the following:

1. A woman wearing a pair of LA Dodger sandals
2. An older woman constantly whining that “It’s colder here than in LA”
3. Said women holding maps, hotel guides, etc.
4. Said women declaring “yeah, we came up from Los Angeles today, and it was a LONG drive!”
5. A guy, walking slowly behind them, shaking his head

then you could be fairly certain that they are tourists, and the guy behind them is about ready to kill himself. All we needed were the visors, huge sunglasses (oh wait, my mom did wear those), disposable cameras, and stupid grins, and we would have been 100% tourists.

(Tangent: My sister just realized that she also brought her LA Dodger T-shirt. If I make it out of here alive, that would be a minor miracle.)

- So Day 1 of my NorCal trip ended with a whimper, and a ton of snoring, mostly from my mom, who proceeded to wake us all up at 7am (hotel check out time: 12pm). The trip got off to a horrible start, as Hertz screwed up our car rental. We wanted a “premium”-sized car (~a Toyota Camry), and were only offered a “standard” (~a Corolla). Angrily, my sister stormed out of Hertz, and went to Enterprise instead, where we got a Toyota Avalon for about the same price as the Corolla would have cost us at Hertz!

So we—my mom, my sister, my nephew, and I—loaded up the car and took off from Monterey Park at 1pm, already running an hour late. I tried to find the cigarette lighter jack in the car, and found that there were two: one in the center console, between the front seats, and one in the “rear” console (which should really be named the center console). Also, the jack in the center console was angled, making the DLO Transpod we brought—if you’ve ever driven up from SoCal to NorCal, or reverse, you know there are huge stretches of nothingness, and scattered radio reception throughout—tough to plug in. I removed the power adapter from the Transpod, and tried to attach that to the center console jack. It went in, but I could not find a way to hook up the Transpod itself, so I yanked the power adapter from the cigarette jack. At least, I tried to; most of the adapter came out, but the metal tip and some surrounding plastic remained in the jack.

Frantic, I stuck my finger into the jack to try to remove the broken-off pieces—smart, I know!—and quickly felt a white-hot burning sensation. I removed my finger, to see a bit of skin burnt right off! I eventually was able to remove the pieces, and found the tip intact, with a bunch of plastic melted off. Worse, neither cigarette lighter jack worked (I tried plugging in both my and my sister’s cell phone charger in both jacks, and neither turned on). I hope I didn’t ruin the jacks…

We pulled off the 5 Freeway around Santa Clarita to go find a cassette adapter for the iPod.

(Tangent: Yes, it was imperative that my sister and I had something to listen to for the trip. Either that, or we would have to listen to our mother…)

We found a Kmart, hopped in, and then I remembered that my sister brought her iPod FM transmitter as well. I also remembered that it could be powered by either the cigarette adapter OR by AAA batteries! We ran into Kmart, grabbed some AAA batteries—fortunately, they were on sale—and were on our way. At this point, it was already 2:30, and we hadn’t made it out of the Valley yet.

Not much happened during the remainder of the trip; my mom fed my nephew some doubly disgusting cereal (doubly disgusting because it was horribly sweet stuff, so much so that the kid didn’t go to sleep until almost midnight, and also because it smelled nasty), we had dinner at Denny’s, and we ended up in (believe it or not) Berkeley, to spend the night at the Golden Bear Inn.

(Tangent: I knew a bunch of people from high school that came up here for school, and yet this is the first time I’ve ever been up here.)

Tomorrow: Day 2 of the NorCal trip…and I gotta make another post about the whole Kobe/LA Lakers situation.