I confess it’s taken me years to pull together my ultimate California bucket list — but that’s probably because there’s so much to do in the Golden State!
I’ve been chipping away at items ever since I moved here in 2005. Some things I did immediately (road trip along State Route 1), some fell off the list entirely (appear as a contestant on The Price is Right), and many I’d still like to do (bike the Golden Gate Bridge, hike in Yosemite, and so on). This post is a compilation of my top 50.
Keep in mind, this list is in no particular order. Also since I live in Southern California, it’s heavy on items in this part of the state.
This week brought fewer naps, a 12-mile bike ride, a handful of hikes and a renewed love of berry smoothies.
On top of a mountain, powered by my own two feet.
The Husband and I also made a quick day trip to the Salton Sea for a short (2-mile) hike along the shoreline.
The Salton Sea, created by Colorado River flooding, is one of the lowest spots on earth and one of the world’s largest inland seas. It’s a bizarre place. Though the sea was once lined with resorts and known as the American Riviera (or the Riviera of California), it’s now surrounded by abandoned homes and dilapidated buildings. It’s also an environmental disaster.
Still, it’s really beautiful. It’s an important stopover for migratory birds. It’s filled with millions of fish. Plus, I have a soft spot for broken places and worn things.
All quiet on the Salton Sea.
I love the stillness there. Like someone pressed life’s pause button.
Maybe that’s why I wanted to take this week’s pregnancy photo there. I’m in a happy place right now, and I want to savor this moment.
My hump: Week 14.
About 30 miles away is the desolate desert town of Niland, home to Slab City, an abandoned military training area that now attracts drifters, squatters and others seeking an alternative lifestyle — one entirely off the grid.
If you’ve seen “Into the Wild,” a portion of it takes place here.
Even Bella from Twilight couldn’t ruin this part of the film.
Salvation Mountain is one man’s attempt to spread a message of faith and love, and he has spent decades constructing this mountain out of hay, mud and more than 100,000 gallons paint. It’s pretty remarkable, and my photo doesn’t come close to showing the size or the fairytale quality of the place. Inside the mountain is a maze of altars and rooms, elaborate displays of car doors, telephone poles, gnarled tree branches, photos and truck parts.
Salvation Mountain. This photo doesn’t even begin to do it justice.
I’m not the most evangelical person in the world — actually, I’m not evangelical at all. But I can respect someone who has this kind of passion and can channel that into a massive work of art.
Bump in the desert.
The other big thing that happened this week: One day I woke up at 4 a.m. and couldn’t pee. This, as many of you might know, is the opposite of what happens to most women during pregnancy. And it was a dramatic shift for me too. Usually I’m pissing all over the place like an incontinent mountain lion.
Have you ever needed to pee and couldn’t? It’s incredibly stressful. Within a matter of minutes, I was Violet Beauregarde. And I panicked.
Stick a fork in me. I’m done.
What happens if I never pee again? I wondered. Can I pop? What if I pop? Certainly popping is bad for the baby.
Luckily, the internet exists, and I quickly found two possible causes of this problem: A urinary tract infection, which is common during pregnancy. Or the baby was blocking the bladder — another common issue, particularly for women who are in week 13-15 (check!) and have a tilted uterus (check!).
The bad news is that this has happened every night since then. I think the baby settles into a strange spot during the night. The good news is that the problem should sort itself out once the baby gets bigger and stops using my bladder for a pillow.
In the meantime, I found some suggestions online from other pregnant ladies for how to kick-start the flow:
* Go to the hospital and have a catheter inserted.
Yeah, that’ll be my last resort. Thanks.
* Sit in different positions on the toilet.
I tried this. I leaned forward. I leaned left. I leaned right. Then I tried turning around backward, like I was riding a toilet pony. None of it worked, but it sure was interesting.
* While you try to urinate, pour a cup of hot water over your ladybits. It will help get things flowing.
What? Ow. No. Who told you this was ok?
* Push your hand up on your cervix and manually shift your uterus up.
You know, I’m really not confident in my ability to push my uterus anywhere. Generally, I just let it go where it wants to go. I’m growing a free-range uterus here.
* Walk around, rub your belly, wait for the baby to shift a little, then try again.
We just moved into a new townhouse, and I love it. It’s like a 1970s Palm Springs dream home, and every day it makes me feel happy just to walk in the door.
However, with every new place comes things both good and bad. Even dream homes.
(Warning: Grainy iPhone photos ahead.)
GOOD
A weird atrium in the middle of the house. Look at all the sunlight! And rocks galore!
BAD
We have nothing to put inside this atrium except a cactus that looks like a penis.
GOOD
Carpet! No more incessant CLICKY-CLICKY-CLICKY of dog nails hitting the hardwood.
BAD
Brown.
GOOD
Microwave! After four years of deliberate, microwave-free living, I was secretly excited to see our kitchen cabinets were pimped out with a microwave.
BAD
It doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t. Look at it. It’s from the Smithsonian Museum of Appliance History.
GOOD
The guest room has a Murphy bed. And as someone who has watched many a comedy film, I know that Murphy beds mean one thing, and one thing only. Hijinks.
BAD
What the hell could be bad about a Murphy bed?
GOOD
The guest room also contains a built-in desk. And a chair too. This room has everything!
BAD
When we moved in, there was a pair of old, pink panties on the chair.
I always seem to move under the worst circumstances.
I moved out of my college apartment while I had alcohol poisoning. I have only the vaguest memory of vomiting several times in rapid succession on the eggshell-colored berber carpet while the new tenants looked on in horror. (Totally my fault.) Years later I moved across the country while my husband was wheelchair-bound, recovering from an accident. (Not my fault.)
This time around, I moved immediately after an exhausting grad school residency while I had bronchitis on a 110-degree day. (The Universe’s fault.)
On this move, I discovered I have things. So many, many things. Things I didn’t even know I had. Things I probably don’t need but moved anyway, just in case. Things I was too sick and hot and exhausted to think about, so I just shoved them into a box.
Thing after thing after thing.
Dog toys.
Ticket stubs, envelopes of photo negatives, programs and other scrapbook memories.
Fifty-seven jars of spices.
Makeup.
1992 Fairborn High School marching band at Grand Nationals VHS tape.
Rice cooker.
Blazers I haven’t worn since I tried them on at the store.
An IKEA table.
A Target lamp.
A bookcase from nowhere in particular.
Nineteen crates of books.
Four crates of cookbooks.
Five crates of textbooks.
A drawer full of socks.
A chair.
Magazines that haven’t been read. I went through and purged a big chunk of the stack, but still two years’ worth of Shape, Fitness and Self remain. (This is what hope looks like.)
Box of markers.
Box of pens.
Box of nail polish, some very clumpy.
A bottle of Sambuca that has been moved from place to place since college. Because I don’t like Sambuca.
Coffeepot, coffee grinder and 12 varieties of tea.
Souvenirs from Obama’s inauguration. The first one.
A heavy bedspread made of sari fabric, purchased on a festive night in Goa. The kind of night in which I didn’t think about the results of my actions, such as how to get a bedspread from India to Palm Springs.
Scarves.
A plastic tub filled with newspaper articles I wrote before everything went online.
My mother’s rocking chair. It is ugly. But it is from this chair that she sang lullabies to me, whispered German nursery rhymes and rocked me to sleep, so I will carry this chair until I die.
Crockpot.
The good news is that on the other side of this hot, gross, sickly move, the perfect townhouse was waiting for me. It’s so perfect and spacious and nice, I don’t want my new home to become cluttered and uncomfortable.
So now that all of my things are here, I’ve finally started to get rid of them.
Let me take you back in time, back before The Husband and I had health insurance.
The Husband was in terrible pain and needed an expensive root canal surgery, but our options were limited. We could drive to Mexico and look for a dentist in Tijuana. We could go to a dentist friend-of-a-friend in Santa Barbara, who was willing to do the work at a discounted rate. Or I could try my luck with an x-acto knife, a pair of pliers and a YouTube instructional video.
He chose the Santa Barbara route.
We were new Californians then, and it was our first visit to Santa Barbara. What little we knew about the place was culled from a new TV show called “Psych” and a soap opera from the ’80s.
The dentist was nice, and I was impressed that he opened his office on his day off to do this favor. His practice had one of those forcefully cheerful names, like Dr. Happy Smile Goodtime Dentist O’ Fun!, so I expected to have a great time. Maybe even get a free pink toothbrush.
My husband settled into the dentist’s chair, and I settled into the waiting room with a stack of books and whatever electronic gadget provided entertainment in 2006. A Tamagotchi, maybe? I don’t remember.
The dentist popped his head out of his office.
“Hey, this is going to take a while,” he said. “Maybe five, six hours. Why don’t you go get a cup of coffee or browse around? I’d hate for you to be stuck here that long.”
He gave me directions to State Street, just a couple blocks away, which is lined with boutique stores, galleries and cafes. Then he said he’d call in a few hours with an update. I put my things in my car, then headed to State Street.
Back then, The Husband was The Fiancé, and we were still in the planning stages of our wedding. So when I passed by a bookstore with a large window display of glossy wedding magazines, it was like having my clothes snagged on a thorny bush. I got stuck, and I couldn’t seem to walk away.
Before I knew it, I was in a coffee shop binging on newly purchased bridal magazines, making crazy lists and planning all kinds of shit with tulle. The lunch crowd came and went, but I remained, reading in-depth articles about how to give good face in my wedding photos and 40 reasons to love an illusion-neckline dress.
I had just reached the end of a quiz (Was I an elegant bride? Or a glamorous bride? Dear God, tell me!), when I glanced at my watch.
Five hours had passed. I still hadn’t received a phone call from the dentist.
Maybe I should call him, I thought. So I rummaged in my purse for my phone. No phone. I looked all over the coffee shop, back the bookstore, inside every store I visited. No phone. And then, in a jolt of panic, I ran as fast I could to the dentist.
The Husband was sitting on the concrete stairs outside the dentist’s office, cradling his jaw with his hand. He was in tears.
All he said was, “I called you.” And then he nearly fainted.
Here’s what happened: After I left the dentist’s office, the dentist realized my husband’s tooth was too far gone to salvage with a root canal. So he pulled it. The Husband was done and out of the chair within a half hour. The dentist, working on his day off, packed up and left. And my poor boo had been sitting outside for more than five hours, holding his achy jaw, with an unfilled prescription for painkillers in his pocket.
I helped him to the car, where my phone was sitting with the rest of my things. I had 27 missed phone calls, all from my husband. The voicemails covered the entire spectrum from “Hey, I got done early. Come pick me up” to “What the hell? Are you ignoring me? The engagement is off!” to “Are you OK? I’m so worried about you.”
The guilt! Oh, the deep, miserable guilt. This one incident is why I scooped the cat litter for YEARS without complaint.
Now, seven years later, it was time to revisit this beautiful city and make the past right. And so for our anniversary, I planned a trip to Santa Barbara.
Through Airbnb I booked a one-bedroom apartment in a leafy neighborhood near State Street. It sounded perfect — a dog-friendly place that boasted a full kitchen, wifi, off-street parking, all kinds of great stuff.
Almost immediately, things went a little awry. The owner of the apartment texted me to say there had been a death in her family, so she didn’t have a chance to clean the place. Also she left her car was in the carport, so we would have to park on the street. I completely understand how the sudden death of a relative can turn everything upside-down, and I truly felt sympathy for this woman, so I cut her a lot of slack. However, I didn’t like that she asked us to lie to her neighbors about who we were and what we were doing there, since she was illegally subletting her apartment.
Later, parked on the street instead of inside the carport, we found a neon-green parking ticket tucked under our windshield wiper.
The next day, in an effort to try something new, The Husband and I took a painting class together and created two lovely pieces of art. We didn’t yet know that just two days later, my husband would drop my painting and shred the canvas.
Then our dog became ill. This involved hours of walking in circles around the pretty, leafy neighborhood, wiping runny poo off the sidewalk.
On one such walk, my husband and I stumbled onto the office of Dr. Happy Smile Goodtime Dentist O’ Fun. The Husband held my hand and gazed at the concrete steps. “Remember when the dentist pulled my tooth and you abandoned me for more than five hours while I was in pain?”
“YES.”
And then our dog defecated on the steps.
Honestly, I wouldn’t say it was a bad vacation. I’ve known people who had bad vacations, and this wasn’t even close. But I will say that this lovely seaside town has a tiny raincloud above it, and it’s addressed only to me. All the things that would pass by uneventfully elsewhere seem to get bumpy for me in Santa Barbara.
I once asked Andrew McCarthy — yes, THAT Andrew McCarthy, the teenage heartthrob-turned-travel writer — how he writes about a location in which something bad happens to him or a place where he doesn’t feel a personal connection.
He said, “I’ve realized that when I don’t feel a connection to a place, it says more about me than it does about the place. It’s rarely ever about the place at all. It’s about what you brought there.”
It means I brought a lot of baggage to Santa Barbara.
Or perhaps, like my husband’s tooth, I’m rotting from the inside out, and Santa Barbara is simply exposing the decay. Who knows?
Either way, it’s a nice enough place that I don’t mind trying to love it again and again.
