California Love

Tomorrow, SK and I jet off to California with my parents and brother to join the rest of my mom's side of the family in a small town on the central coast, just north of Santa Barbara. That's right folks, I'm talking about Lompoc. The town made famous by Vin Diesel's incorrect pronunciation of it's name in the first Fast/Furious movie. The clod.

I was born in Lompoc and lived there until I was 5, when we headed south. I spent the next 10 years of my life in Highland, another small, relatively unknown California town. We road-tripped up to Lompoc as often as my parents could go, and even when I hit those awful teenage years where nothing is cool and everything sucks, I still loved going to see my grandparents and aunts and uncles up north.

You can fall in love at first sight with a place as with a person. ~Alec Waugh

Every year over the last weekend of June, is the Lompoc Valley Flower Festival. It's a carnival/fair games/food/live music fest all held in the park in the middle of town. There is a parade on Saturday morning, and yeah, it's about as small-time as it sounds. But we all love it and I haven't been in 10 years, so I am stoked. Also, this will be the first year my brother and I are able to get into the elusive Beer Tent that we've seen our parents and aunts and uncles stumble out of so many times before. Hell yes.

How hard it is to escape from places. However carefully one goes they hold you - you leave little bits of yourself fluttering on the fences - like rags and shreds of your very life. ~Katherine Mansfield

There is nothing quite so pleasant as going home again. ~Margaret Elizabeth Sangster