I saw this the other day and it made me think. What was it?
I finished up my first tour on the Middle East Force flagship and headed to the Guided Missile School in Dam Neck, Virginia and following that, in a singular act of mercy and charity not realized at the time, I took my brother and my worldly goods from Arlington, VA to my new duty station on what I thought at the time had to be the worst destroyer in the navy. I may have been wrong but I was much younger then.
We drove cross country to Oklahoma in June, spent the day/night in the pool at the hotel and then headed to Albuquerque, New Mexico where we spent a day and a night with my sister and her husband and dropped off some cribs we brought for the twins they were expecting imminently and then we pressed on to California.
We crossed the border into Needles after midnight under clear skies and a giant full moon and as we crossed the desert we saw something we never saw before. The desert was alive with headlights racing over the dunes and there were pools of light and merriment surrounding RVs parked all over for mile after mile. It was fascinating.
We arrived in San Diego where poor planning meant a room for one night only so after we got up we searched out another place to stay before I checked aboard the ship and we found ourselves driving up around Torrey Pines in search of the Naval Air Station at Miramar and we saw our first hang glider and followed it to the glider port there by UCSD and as we were watching with some interest as lunatics threw themselves off a very high ocean bluff over the ocean we heard this old geezer standing next to us with a telephoto lens the size of New Jersey exclaim, "They aren't wearing any clothes down there!" My brother and I looked and with that we discovered Black's Beach on our very first day.
I checked aboard the destroyer and 3 days later I was my way to the North Pole and my brother was flying his sun burned nether regions home to Virginia and a girl friend who was going to ask him about those blisters on his ass.
It was 1985 and what was there to not like in California? The governor was Republican, the State was beautiful beyond your ken unless you lived there and it was bug free with damned near perfect weather. I bounced back and forth between the Bay Area and San Diego with interludes in the Middle East and Korea and the Far East and lived in Chula Vista, downtown San Diego, Solana Beach, Encinitas, Emeryville and Oakland.
It ended when I was asked to house sit for my sister while she went to Norway for a year with her family and I left without really looking back. My stay was longer there than anywhere but we were raised to roam and I left with no regrets. As I look back that's kind of hard to believe after arriving there with a brother who left only to come back, settle down, finally, stay, marry, raise a family and these are things I did as well for awhile. It was a nice place.
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