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The Grand Blow Mold Adventure
Lodi, California, is five hours and fourteen minutes by way of the 99, which is the route you want if you’re stopping for fruit and nuts at Bravo Farms. Expect a high of about 109F, but it’s a dry heat that will only affect you if you unwisely decide to leave the car or whatever air conditioned space you’ve taken refuge in. The car is a just-acquired ‘20 Volvo XC40, electric blue and black, solution to a math problem involving a $6000 repair estimate. A pre-birthday steak dinner awaits, along with a photo op the next day with Matt, collector extraordinaire of blow molds. Penny’s got her eye on a few additions to her own collection. Whatever we can fit in the Volvo. The hotel’s got a swimming pool, but it’s ten minutes to closing by the time we finish dinner and take a swing by downtown Lodi. Downtown’s got both character and characters. The trick is to leave the motor running, ready for a quick getaway. There’s a tattoo parlor on the corner with windows all around. I grab some shots of a young woman, accompanied by friends and family, as she gets her hip inked. The lit up Lodi sign. We find the original A&W, but it doesn’t wow me.
Saturday/Sunday isn’t long enough to do this right. At dinner, I calculate time to Mammoth Lakes so we can cut down the 395. But that means ten hours of driving, instead of five. Our visit to Matt’s wraps up by 10am. For ten of those minutes, I knew more about blow molds than I could have possibly imagined. Angels, Santas, Snowmen with creepy Santa peeking over his shoulder, carolers, a patchful of pumpkins, a witch, even the Statue of Liberty (worth a lot, and not for sale!). Too hot for a more in depth tour of downtown. We loaded up the Volvo and headed for a well rated steakhouse in Visalia, it being pre-birthday weekend of all you can eat of whatever you damn well please. But Yelp didn’t anticipate that Nash’s would be closed, perhaps for the summer, perhaps forever. We adjust, then head back out with a minor detour to Exeter and Porterville, with no inclination of what to expect. In Porterville, we find an oasis of juxtaposed anomalies. Bright, shiny towers surrounded by fence and a basketball court with a basketball and a soccer ball lying in the cul de sac, used at some point. A beat up blue 68 Chevy and telephone poles. Not a soul in sight, nor hint of what the most recent score might be. On to Bakersfield through backroads of tall, dry grass that give way further south to the nodding donkeys of Oildale.
Uncle Louie (my grand uncle who rode a motorcycle and used to make bread pudding for my dad), was a Volvo mechanic. When talking about Volvos, he’d get very serious and state “oooh…good car.” He and Aunt Pana used to get lost driving down to LA in their old Ford. Before the superhighways, there was the 99 and these backroads. Paper roadmaps, wads of cash, jugs of coffee, and picnic baskets with sandwiches and apples and carrots. Back in those days, you might blow a tire or get a hole in your radiator, run out of gas in the middle of nowhere. You’d hitch a ride to the next town and come back with a can of ethyl, or maybe you’d get a tow to the service station, where they had piles of tires wrapped up like mummies. Whitewalls with the big, fat stripes.
These days, we’ve got AWD and credit cards and all sorts of mechanisms to get us unstuck. People halfway around the world pitch in to help when hell breaks loose. The Spotify connection stays solid, miles from nowhere. But we’re not testing limits here. We’re simply out for a weekend jaunt on the grand blow mold adventure.
Musical Moment
This week’s musical moment is inspired by the brand new Sphere of Technology section here on The Courage Run.
Networking + Boat Cruise!
Sue Brooke of Alignable is hosting an epic networking and boat cruise event on August 3 down in Long Beach. Sue is a rock star networker and teacher, one of the original Alignable Ambassadors, and she’s traveling the nation in an RV helping small business owners build their referral networks. Come join us for happy hour and a cruise!