The last day of our trip… I’m about ready to come home which is good timing. I’m actually writing this in the airport terminal awaiting our flight.

Today we intended to drive through a certain part of the mountains, but a combination of circumstances led to a change of plans.(getting up a little bit late, getting pictures developed, getting someone else’s pictures instead of our own, late breakfast at Denny’s, and a 15 car pile up where several of the cars burst into flame)

I passed up purchasing a portable dvd player at Wal-Mart for $75 – a decision I am regretting now, but I suppose it was for the best.

I would have had to purchase the DVD player, and then the challenge of finding a way to charge the battery for 14 hours when I only had 12 hours till we had to get to the airport. Besides that, I would have had to purchase dvds that I might never want to watch again. I considered looking into purchasing an inverter to run in the car to charge the battery, I also considered a trip to Radio Shack to purchase the necessary accessories to build a battery pack.

If I had attempted any of these options, (trust me I wanted to) it would have been a bit inconsiderate of Candace who was in a hurry to get to Denny’s

Now I am sitting at the airport with 3 hours to kill, and nothing to do but type in this stupid blog.

OK so anyway, it was cloudy for most of the day today, and it rained for about 30 minutes.

The only scheduled thing we did was tour Sony owned Columbia Pictures lot. The tour was ok, but they were freaky weird about protecting their films, and so we couldn’t really go behind the scenes too much.

The highlights for me would have been seeing the screening rooms where they do audio post. They were empty when we went through, but you could tell they were working rooms. The one guy who showed us around that area when asked who was the most difficult to work with replied instead with who he really liked to work with – and he mentioned Mel Gibson who posted “the passion” audio in that same room we were in.

The room was huge, with amazing paintings on the ceilings (like a cathedral or something.)

We saw a sound stage for a tv show they are shooting called joan of arcadia… it sounds lame.

Mostly these two tour guides tried to be funny, and they threw around names of films, tv shows, actors, directors, and expected us to know (and care) Mostly I realized I am pretty out of touch with the whole racket. So the tour was ok, but not really that great.

We had hoped to eat our lunch as a picnic in the mountains somewhere, but it didn’t work out, so we just pulled off the side of the road and made our sandwiches there. We have enough left over for our return flight, so it worked out perfect.

After driving for what seemed a millennium. We finally got to Chinatown for a last tourist stop, got a small gift for a friend, and headed to the car rental place.

That’s the whole day. And the end of our trip.

I am looking forward to getting home for tons of reasons. Probably the biggest is to see Maria again. Also to sleep in my own bed. I guess I felt that as long as we were traveling here, we needed the make the most of our trip, and see whatever we could see. One guy on our boat to Catalina island had read almost an entire book while he was there. He didn’t see any of the island, he just relaxed. On one hand, I respected him for knowing how to relax on vacation… on the other hand, I thought he was ridiculous because he spent all that money, and time on the boat, and everything, just to read a freakin book.

I like adventures, a whole lot… but when it comes to life, I’m a bit more like a hobbit. I value friends, family, home cooked (inexpensive) food. And smoking pipe weed (just kidding on the last one)