Aliens, Paupers, and the Guy-In-The-Sky

Day 4

23.20 miles

I wandered outside in my bare feet to check the weather. The ground was wet but it wasn’t raining. My feet, splash-splash-splashing in the puddles. My toes, white with cold.

Once on the road, it rained on us a little bit. Misty but not bad. Not too serious. To save pulling out the maps nineteen times an hour, we just decided to count how many bodies of water we went over, or how many streets down, and which way.

‘Two Waters, Three Streets, and a Left’.

More trains that are way too silent and totally sneak up on you. No one could ever get out of the way fast enough and no wonder people are killed on the tracks.

We stopped at Inspiration Point. Took selfies that unintentionally made us look like we were pooping. Together.

More mansions. They never ended. Jennie morphed into Negative Nellie.

‘Who cleans all these places?’ she asked, cluck-cluck-clucking and shaking her head.

‘Yeah, and how much is the HOA?’ I helped.

A guy looked up from his porch and watched us go by. Aliens, he thought. Paupers.

Old people made eye contact with us while they sat in their cream colored Jag-or-BMW-or-whatever and the rain rained on us. They waited until we were almost in front of them before they cut us off.

Aliens, they thought. Paupers.

We finally made that left and ended up on a lovely, empty beach path. Populated only by dedicated runners and unfortunate folk with no other place to go in the rain.

We rode and talked and made up scenarios for our next bike tour. When we were finally too wet for rain jackets to even matter anymore, we went ahead and put them on.

Without any turns or waters, we didn’t realize how close we were to the spot where Mom waited.

Within five minutes we were at the car. We took the rain jackets off again and hopped in and the Guy-In-The-Sky Immediately Dumped the Bucket. It poured and poured and then poured some more and the hotel insisted they were still 100% full from the night before and wouldn’t give us our room yet even though there were only five cars in the parking lot. Bastards.

So we took our soaking wet selves to a Turkish restaurant for food but they left the front door open and wouldn’t let me close it and I was shivering with cold and complaining a lot. So Mom and Jennie agreed to take it all to go and sit in the car until the Bastards let us in.

I floated on my back in the hot tub pool and let the cold rain spatter on my face. I got out for a minute until I was really cold and then hopped back in.

Snow-Monkey-Style.

The digital clock in the room clacked away and everything smelled like mold so we headed out to San Juan Capistrano where Mom looked for swallows yesterday.

It was closed when we arrived, but huge prickly pear cacti with fruits and flowers poked their heads over the tall wall and told me to try my hand at making cactus jelly. The walls of the mission were topped with concrete so they didn’t fall down. But there were no swallows. Hummingbirds, but no swallows. Tall Palms with skinny trunks and short fat pineapple ones but no swallows.

Mr. Raven hoppity-hopping his ritual dances around scraps of food left by tourists. Don’t poop on me, I tell him as he heads home for the night way up above. Huge agave plants and hollyhocks. Mom says she used to make dolls out of hollyhock flowers. The flowers from skirts and the bodies from buds.

Where can we see the swallows, we ask the lady who is guarding the entrance and only letting rich people inside.

Well, they fly around all over town, she says, but I heard you can see a lot down by the river.

Can I just take a quick look inside the mission? Mom asks. Just from right over there?

The woman shakes her head and looks at us. Alien paupers. Guess we didn’t show up in our Jag.

We go down to the super sketchy river walk. Wander up and down for a while, passing tents in places no one should have to live. Jennie watches a guy shoot up down by the trashy trickle of river.

But no swallows.

We walk past a hair salon focused on lice removal.

And it rained some more.