First, Bandon -- a lovely beach town on the Oregon Coast, not far from Andrew & Mikala's honeymoon cabin. Here we got haircuts,
scored at the thrift shop,
and flew kites.
On the way into town, Simon & Mikala picked the only two kites in the drug store bin without Disney characters on them (his call, honest!) -- it didn't occurred to us until later that we could stage our own Seafair airshow on the beach -- first the Blue Angel trick kite, then the WWII prop plane. The first afternoon we took the prop plane out for a spin, but there wasn't quite enough wind. The second day we tried again, but there was too much wind -- we had to reel the kites in so they wouldn't be torn apart by G-forces their plastic joints were never meant to bear. But on the third day the wind was, as Goldilocks would say, just right -- and Simon and I hit the beach with both kites after lunch.
The Blue Angels trick kite took some patience & practice: the ratio of time spent slowly untangling & rewinding the double strings to time spent actually swooping the kite through the air in graceful figure eights was maybe a little higher than we might have liked, but still tolerable for a person on vacation with no more Harry Potter books left to read. And when it was airborne -- swooping left and right at the yank of a string, yellow and blue tails curling through the sky in a mad effort to keep up -- there wasn't much of anything such a person would rather be doing.
Simon, meanwhile, figured out a complicated sequence of string maneuvers and sprints that would make the prop plane stall out in midair, plummet toward the earth in a heart-stopping nosedive remarkably similar to the ones we saw at Seafair, and come screaming out of the dive seconds before hitting the sand. Most of the time, anyway.
Other times the red and yellow tails would get wrapped all around the plane as it tumbled out of the sky -- you can't really tell in the picture, but when the wind had them all whipped up in a fluttery froth, they looked an awful lot like flames.
After our relaxing stay in Bandon, we drove to Eugene. Andrew and the kids headed home from there on I-5, while I headed south to LA on Amtrak's Coast Starlight. The train journey was peaceful, if long: my only human contact consisted of flirting with a 1-year-old who was learning to walk, chatting briefly with a retired conductor, and a surreal meal in the dining car, where I was seated with a retired asbestos inspector, a kid on his way to Burning Man, and a dying old man who kept pouring generous shots of Stoli out of a paper bag into his iced tea.
Weekend in LA was great -- some down time, some time with the 'rents, and a very low-key high school reunion of sorts...
And despite that ominous column of forest fire smoke looming over the city (and over Will Rogers Park above), I came away feeling incredibly lucky to have grown up here.
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