Planes, Trains, Automobiles...and a Bus?

The blog has had to be on hiatus for the past six days while I sojourned in San Diego and Los Angeles. It was a real life case of "Planes, Trains and Automobiles," as the John Candy-Steve Martin movie was termed. Only in my case it was "Planes, Trains, Automobiles and a Bus." San Diego, the second largest city in California, is exquisitely beautiful. The temperate clime has a mean average of 72 degrees F per year with a mean differential of nine degrees F throughout the year. I was in San Diego for the Boy Scouts of America's National Annual Meeting. It was an opportunity to meet with friends and colleagues and to sit in on some of the meetings for the two national committees on which I serve. San Diego is a very clean city and the nearby island of Coronado is so picturesque because retail outlets like Burger King, Subway and McDonald's are deliberately required to be low key and to blend into the existing architecture and neighborhood zoning. A U.S. Navy base occupies much of the island and one can see the Navy S.E.A.L.S. units practicing being dropped from helicopters and wenched back up as well as conducting nighttime activities on the San Diego bay in full camouflage and wet suits. After the meetings in San Diego, I took the Pacific Surfliner to Los Angeles. Looking out of the window at the Pacific Ocean seems almost like being on board a cruise ship at certain points of the journey. I travelled Business Class and I would recommend it for anyone considering that form of travel between San Diego and L.A. After the train arrived in downtown L.A., I hopped a Flyways bus to Los Angeles Airport (LAX) so that I could rent a car for the remainder of the week in L.A. Coming up tomorrow will be a description of the Magic Castle, where I was fortunate to be an invited guest on Friday night. I will not speak of the Los Angeles Dodgers game on Saturday night versus the St. Louis Cardinals out of respect for the team that should have posted a win, but suffered a very embarrassing loss before a hometown crowd.