Did I mention that we no longer had to deal with the greyhound bus. We took a shuttle from Prescott to Phoenix, the shuttle was delightfully void of any conversations regarding menopausal hot flashes and smoker's coughs. Then the plane.
So many loud conversations, it took me by surprise. I'm so used to flights were people sit in uncomfortable silence, quietly battling over the arm rest and trying to watch the one-dimensional films which, if they were any good in the first place, would be ruined by the miserably small screens and captain's interruptions. But not on this flight, everyone seemed to get along like old friends. Except Ed and I, sitting there in the airplane inspired silence we were raised in. Nevertheless, at the end of the flight I asked someone a question about a conversation I had overheard. It struck me as a very American thing to do, perhaps I was becoming assimilated into the culture.
Having been punched in the mouth on my last night in Leeds due to a drunken attempt at banter with with an extremely sensitive friend of a friend. As a result, one of my front teeth was now an attractively dark shade of grey. I feared this was nerve damage and simply wanted to find out how much it would cost to fix in San Diego.
"About $1200. Did you deserve it?"
"Probably." Though I probably didn't deserve any violence for my behaviour in Leeds, I'm sure there are enough transgressions in my life for karma to try and land a few right hooks on me.
(As it later turned out, my tooth was just bruised. $1200 dollars was the exact price quoted to fix it, but it would just be a cosmetic fix. The alternative would be to spend my life with a very dark front tooth, as I was told it would never heal its colour on its own. In the end, I didn't have any surgery and the tooth did heal itself.)
We arrived in San Diego airport. after collecting our luggage, it dawned on me that I might not have the address of the house we were staying at on me. I could definitely access it online, but we had no internet access at that point. After about ten minutes of searching, I did eventually find it written down.
We got a taxi and made our way down to my uncle's house. My uncle wasn't there, instead he was off vacationing with his girlfriend. He had left a long list of things to do to make his house inhabitable. As an inventor, he tended to fix everything himself and as a result, simple utilities in his home could be very complicated if you didn't know what you were doing. Luckily, his instructions were clear, and beyond running water and a place to sleep, we didn't need much.
For dinner, we bought cheetos and vodka. We mixed the vodka with American lemonade and enjoyed a gourmet supper. Then we took a few beer down to enjoy by the beach. Now technically, one isn't legally allowed to enjoy any alcoholic beverage by the beach or really anywhere in public that isn't a bar or restaurant. We took paper bags in true hobo-like form, but I felt horribly ill after my first sip of Stella. It may have been the vodka lemonade, jetlag, the beer may not have gone down terribly well after the cheetos dinner, whatever the reason I felt horribly ill at that moment. I had to lie down. There was a bench right there. I laid down. For a long time.
So the dinner of cheetos and vodka, drinking from a paper bag and resting on a park bench might not have been the classiest of starts to our visit to San Diego. It did mean that it could only get better. On our return to my uncle's house we met his neighbours. Though this was only a brief chat through a window we would come to have a very entertaining experience with them the next day.
