GIGO: words unreadable aloud

T O Trip

Took a bittersweet trip south to T.O., aka Thousand Oaks, last weekend. Visited my nephew (whose father, my younger brother, died one year ago) and his mother and her partner. Also got to visit my older brother. Good to see everyone.

Brief notes about the trip ...

It's the Lambing time of year, and there are some fields of sheep and lambs in the southern parts of the Salinas and Nacimiento valleys.
NV4U2C ... on a Honda Civic ???
DRMABUM ... on a minivan. (Would Jack Kerouac have driven a minivan?) Maybe they meant "Drama Bum" instead of "Dharma Bum".
A few poppies are already blooming south of Santa Maria.
You know you're in the southland when you see a strip mall that has a Guns & Uniforms store in it.
Took the San Marcos Pass route. Noticed my "low-gas" light turn on just after I got off of 101. Never having actually seen a gas station for those 35 miles, I was a bit worried, but decided to head south on 246 towards Solvang. There's a gas station barely a mile south of 154, near the Chumash reservation's casino.
On the south-facing slope, on the way down towards Goleta and Santa Barbara, it seemed like the entire hillside was covered with white Ceanothus in bloom. I did also spy a few of the blue kind. Seems like in the bay area, we get more of the blue ones, though they won't start blooming until mid-March.
I guess I'll have to read Cliff Schmidt's Ceanothus page in order to figure out the real names of the two varieties with which I'm most familiar.

11:52:44 PM comment/