Rubbing elbows

I ended up in San Diego, Calif., over the weekend, because about a week and a half ago, I wrote my friend, Bonnie, to see how we could meet up in Los Angeles and she wrote back that she had to be at Comic-Con for work and that I should join her, staying with her in her room at The Hyatt and tagging along, as she walked the conference floor and attended panels and after-parties. She didn’t have to tell me twice. The only concern was what to do with Rennie but the universe was looking out for me and it just so happened that Bonnie had booked her lodging on a dog-friendly floor at the 1,600-room hotel, and so after my three-day visit with childhood friend Gus in Orange County, Rennie and I drove to San Juan Capistrano, a cute little town that houses one of the 21 missions founded in Alta California more than 200 years ago, and we hung around for an hour or so, waiting for Bonnie to arrive on the Amtrak train out of downtown Los Angeles. Then Rennie had to relinquish shot gun in Marco and the three of us went speeding down the interstate, looking over the center median with pity at the huge line of cars going in the opposite direction and stopped at border control, because they were on the one major road out of Mexico. Just outside San Diego in Rancho Santa Fe, we stopped at Bonnie’s friend Annette’s house and had a late dinner with her and husband Mark and their two young sons, but then it was nearly midnight and I was bleary-eyed and we still had about 30 minutes to drive, before we were there, so we left under an eerily bright red sky and navigated through the dark, remote streets of the gated community, until we found the interstate again and cruised the remaining miles into town, where we found an enormous gaggle of people milling about the lobby.

“There are a lot of people awake at 1 in the morning,” Bonnie said.

And she was right. Little did we know, it was setting the tone for the rest of the weekend, which really, is best summed up in photos, because even though I did tweet a little bit, there was just so much going on and it was all so completely outside my usual realm of reality, I spent most of the three days pretty much stunned into silence, just trying to take it all in. See if you can make anything of it.