When we were finally in California, in the Mojave Desert, I woke up from a nap just sweating and so uncomfortably warm. "Did you turn off the AC?" I asked? "No, but it is getting kind of warm" Dennis said. Well, upon further inspection, the AC was indeed on, and was indeed blowing out hot air! The car was not overheating at all though. So it turned out our AC was broken!!! Ahh! How did people used to make this drive without AC? I since have read Children of the Dust Bowl, by Jerry Stanley (a book I highly recommend) and they talk about families traveling to CA from Oaklahoma during the depression, and it mentions the problems they had with their cars in the Mojave desert. Not a place you want to have car problems!
Well, me not loving sweating unless I am exercising, and it being over 100 degrees outside, I insisted we stop at the next town to get the AC looked at, and if it was a quick fix to get it done so the next few hours wouldn't be so miserable. Unfortunately, there weren't too many places to stop. When we did come to a town we pulled into a tire shop and asked if they knew where we could get our AC looked at. They looked at it and said they couldn't help us, but gave us a card for a shop that could. As we pulled away (by this point I was holding an ice pack to try to keep cool) Dennis called the number on the card, and of course, the number was disconnected. We drove around for a few minutes but couldn't find a place so we headed back down the road towards the beach.
When we finally arrived to our hotel, all sweaty and overly warm, we checked in and I almost just wanted to stay in the room to keep cool! But we changed into our suits and headed to the beach! Down by the water it was much cooler and we could drive with the windows open. We grabbed some dinner and found a free parking spot and ran into the ocean. It was evening so I didn't stay in too long since the water was cool, but it felt so nice, and the ocean was beautiful! Nice sandy beaches and water as far as you can see! It was great!
The next two days were awesome. We went boogie boarding, took a little ferry and walked around Balboa Island, got ice cream, found a place that overlooked the marina and served the best clam chowder in sour dough bread bowls (we went there a few times) and really just wished we could stay for a few weeks instead of days. They have the coolest beach houses all along the water, and a lot of them are rentals. We just kept thinking that it would be so fun to rent out a beach house with or families for a week. There is just something about a beach that makes you want to stay there forever. I think I could go to the ocean everyday and never get bored of it.
Here are some pics, but we need to get a better camera, and better photography skills.
The view from our favorite restaurant
They called it "Faugust" because it had been so foggy there!
You can see all the beach houses in the background
Boogie Boarding!
We didn't want to spend any money at the mall, plus all the stores were closed when we got there. Then Dennis got a call saying that the problem with the AC is a switch, that would cost over a thousand dollars to get fixed, unless we wanted the guy to jimmy-rig it, which would only cost $400, but there was no guarentee it would work or last long. CRAP! What were we supposed to do? Now we were mad we didn't just leave the night before or earlier in the morning, but now it was 10:30, already getting warm, and we would be driving through hundred degree weather for about 8 hours without AC! And we sure didn't want to spend $1400 to get it fixed! So we were really frustrated about what to do. We finally just told the guy we didn't want him to fix it, waited til he put the car back together, got picked up from the mall and paid him over $100 just for looking at it.
We decided the best thing to do (mostly because I would complain too much about the heat) was to stay the rest of the day at the beach, then around 5 start driving back, so we could mostly drive at night when the temps were cooler. We went to Huntington Beach and watched the surfers for a while (there were so many of them!) then decided we really like Newport Beach better so we went back, went to our favorite place and got clam chowder, and just relexed. At five we got back in the car just in time to hit traffic. Lots of traffic. For a few hours, traffic. But the nice thing was it kept us by the cooler air longer. Dennis was a champ and drove all through the night so I could get a little sleep before my meetings the next morning (he later told me he was pinching himself to stay awake).
A couple weeks later, after sweating profusely from driving in the heat in Utah without AC, we took the car in to get it fixed. Our brother-in-law called Dennis, and said, "You have big feet." Yep, big feet was the problem. Dennis's big feet kicked a fuse, causing the AC to go out, so about $40 later, my car was fixed and I had AC again!
Huntington Beach
We both had layers of aloe gel on our faces from getting sunburns
Clam Chowder at our favorite restaurant
I think Dennis's face was so sunburned it was hard for him to smile
This was a cool sports museum - Dennis is standing by a Gold Glove!
I thought this was cool - the evolution of football helmets
The clam chowder definitely looks good! That just happens to be what I was craving for dinner tonight, ha ha! Sorry about the whole AC incident, but at least it was cheap to fix and a funny story to boot!
ReplyDelete