50 for 50: 20 - Waterslide with Nicole

Upon leaving Knott's Soak City, I spotted the entrance sign that says you're not allowed in the pools if you're experiencing active diarrhea.  Now, call me crazy, but if I've got the runs, a six-storey gravity enema is not real high on my to-do list, but there's no figuring people, I guess.

Rewind a bit.  I met Nicole at her place, which is being packed up because she and her husband are moving to a house!  Much excitement!  (I also met her cats, and little Olive stole my heart -- don't tell Jasmine.  Well, it's ok.  We seem to have unlimited quantities of heart when it comes to the kitties.)

Drove over to Soak City, got easy parking....  I can't prove it, but it looks like they just took part of the Knott's parking lot and made it a water park.  (On the theory that they could make more money per square inch by charging $40+ admission per person rather than $18 per car.  They're probably right.)

Obligatory photo!

There are no further photos.  This (like Glen Ivy with Alice) is the second time where we followed website directions about cameras and cell phones only to discover there was rather more flexibility.  The website had been very particular about no loose items on the rides, but we saw a bunch of people who were told they couldn't wear their water shoes on the ride so just had to hold them all the way down.  I very likely could have kept my little plastic waterproof camera with me; hell, it had a rubber wristband (unlike the water shoes).  Sigh.

SO.  We got there when it was still early, and the park was still pretty empty.  I said I wanted to do at least one fun/scary one, and then we could just hang on the lazy river, or whatever.  (You'll note the 50 for 50 was actually "waterslide" not "water park.")

We're just trying to pick a slide at random.  The signage is less than helpful.  Nothing actually SAYS "enter here"; "grab inner tube here"; or "leave your damn shoes."  We sort of had to figure it out.  (And we went the wrong way trying to find the entrance for a slide on a little island.  "Where's the freakin' bridge?!")  But we finally found the entrance, grabbed, tubes, left shoes, and climbed the tower for the first water slide.  This one had three tubes heading down -- so we went down more or less simultaneously.  They were enclosed, and you didn't quite know what was happening; but along the journey, there were little openings in the top of the tube where water poured in on your head.  That was an attention-getter, but the ride wasn't particularly scary.

We decide that (despite them having called that one a 5 out of 5 action slide) these are not that big of a deal, so we'd ride another.  That one has 3 tubes, two closed and one open to the top.  We ride a closed one, and it's fun, so we go back to ride the open one.  Each is ridden with an inner tube.

While we're going up the stairs to ride the second time, we notice some people climbing the stairs without inner tubes, and they're passing the entry to this ride to go up ANOTHER flight to another landing where there's another ride.  It just shares the stairs.  Okay then.  We'd glanced at it coming in, and I'd thought it looked fun, so we decide to try that one.  It has two open slides and one closed one.  I'd enjoyed the open one last time, while Nicole preferred the closed, so that decision was pretty much made for us.  I hadn't actually, um, looked very closely at the two open ones, so I hadn't really thought through which one of the two open ones I wanted to ride.  Woman at the top of the ride offered me one, so I went for it.

I may have gotten a little nervous when she explained, "cross your ankles; cross your arms across your chest; lean back all the way down."  (But those other dudes were doing it while holding their water shoes, so it's ok, right?)  Feet first, assume position, slide down, and...

Holy Kittens!

Gravity, gravity, gravity, gravity, WATER!

I looked back at it.  Looked like this:

I'd apparently taken that orange-yellow one in the center -- the straight shot down without any little bumps to slow you down.  Now THAT, kids, is a Waterslide.  Mission Accomplished!

Somehow the whole "one big slide and then the lazy river" plan was shot.  We thought we'd try more fun ones instead.  We did a "family" slide which wasn't super scary, but we rode it together; and then a head-first one where you slid down on mats (and they sent six people down at once, so we could race!)  It went well, but about partway down the one with the mat, I realized I did not have proper form -- was supposed to have my arms straight in front of me (holding the handles on the mat) but instead my elbows were bent and my head was closer to the front.  Couldn't really adjust myself so I figured I'd just deal, at which second my sled hit the big pool at the bottom and the massive splash hit me square in the face.  Which was how I got more wet on the, easy, category 4 slide than on the six-storey category 5 speed drop.

There was really only one other category 5 slide left at the park; but by now, the place was getting crowded and the lines for that one didn't seem worth it.  So, we rinsed off and bailed.  Lesson:  You can pretty much do all the action slides in this park in about an hour and a half -- if you start early enough.

Then we went out for burgers and shakes, which was pretty ideal for two near-drowned rats.

Along the way, I learned a bit more about Nicole -- we're coworkers, but haven't had tons of time (other than lunches) to actually socialize.  So I learned that she and her husband were college sweethearts (awwww), and that they got their first kitty right after they got married, and where they'd moved, and how they found the house, and all that other good stuff.

(Then I came home, took what Peggy amusingly called a "Silkwood shower," and crashed on the sofa.  These 50 for 50 things seem to end with crashing on the sofa more and more.  Worth it!)

50 for 50: 19 - Kayaking with Laura

Laura, bless her, is largely what made me think the "50 for 50" could actually be accomplished.  I'm pretty sure Terry was the first one to actually agree to a thing, but when I threw the idea out there and Laura said she was up for kayaking, I thought, "yeah, maybe I actually CAN do this."

This 50 for 50 was accomplished in almost exactly 25 hours.

The clock started at 4:30 on Friday, when Laura picked me up from work, and we headed South for a quickie evening at Disneyland.  (To avoid getting stuck in Friday evening traffic all the way down to La Jolla.  Seriously.  That was my justification.  I'm sticking with it.)  We had both really wanted to check out the new "Guardians of the Galaxy" overlay to Tower of Terror, and I kept checking the wait time on the Disneyland app as we were driving down.  When she picked me up, it was under an hour.  As we neared the park, it was over two.  By the time we got ourselves there, parked, through security, and into the ol' Happiest Place on Earth, it had settled down to something like 90 minutes.  Armed with that data, our deep desire to ride the ride, our general understanding that Disneyland overstates line wait times, and a coupla hot dog platters for sustenance, we joined the queue.  We were pleasantly surprised by how fast the line actually moved, as well as all the cool stuff to look at.

And then we rode it, and it was awesome!

And then we rode the "Cars" cars ("Cars"-land is so beautiful at night!) and then we went over to Disneyland to see the fireworks (catching a bit of the Main Street Electrical Parade on the way) -- but it was too windy "at high altitudes" so they had to cancel the fireworks mid-show (although we did get to see Tinkerbell fly before they stopped, which was great, because who doesn't want to see Tink fly?), and then we got root beer floats, and then, and then...  (Geez, I really AM a 12-year-old with a credit card.)  Fortified by the sugar rush from the floats, we went back to the car and drove all the way down to La Jolla.

I'd booked a hotel on hotwire, and called the hotel to confirm we'd be there late.  I had guessed midnight.  We got there more like 12:30.  By the time we'd parked, found the Registration desk, pinged the little bell, and began check-in, it was pushing 1:00 a.m.  The nice man at the hotel upgraded us to the Executive Floor.  (Free breakfast!  Thanks, Christian!)

At some point during the day -- but not early enough to do anything about it, I realized I hadn't packed a toothbrush.  Christian said he'd send one up.  I waited a good 20 minutes, but then hung the "do not disturb" and crashed into bed, with great hopes of being visited by the Toothbrush Fairy overnight.

Six and a half hours later, I awoke refreshed and excited ... with my neurons firing enough for me to get creative with some floss picks and Q-Tips, as I was still toothbrushless.  A situation remedied by a nice lady from Housekeeping while Laura and I were enjoying our Executive Lounge free brekkie.  (I am grateful to the lady from Housekeeping for getting the toothbrush, because I partook of some lox and bagels at the breakfast, and I thought nobody -- except my cat -- really enjoys Salmon Breath.)

Having been alerted that parking at the kayaking place blows, we took a Lyft from the hotel.  And arrived at La Jolla Sea Cave Kayaks right on time.

On time to sign the waiver, on time to change into kayaky clothes, on time to snap a pic, and on time to lock the rest of our stuff in their lockers.  (Their lockers, btw, work on the principle that everyone is honest.  They give you a zip tie to use to lock your locker, and when you get back, they give you pliers to snap off the zip tie.  And everyone in your group is just passing around the pliers -- you just hand them off to the next guy and assume that he's using them on his own locker, rather than to steal someone else's junk.  And while you were off kayaking, you were assuming that nobody in the shop was snapping zip ties off and stealing stuff.  BASICALLY, the zip ties were there to keep your stuff safe in the unlikely event everyone in the shop went on break and a thief with zero tools happened by.  But, really, we were trusting this shop with out LIVES, so maybe we could also trust them with our mobiles.)

Then, our group and two guides walked over to the beach, had a brief lesson ("this is your kayak paddle; this is This Side Up on your kayak paddle"), and a brief safety briefing ("when I say face the wave, TURN INTO THE WAVE or you'll capsize"), and then loaded up the kayaks and started paddling out.  There were a few small waves we had to get by, but we'd been well schooled in how to deal (lean way back in the kayak so the weight is toward the back and the tip flies up harmlessly over the whitecap), and we got out in the water pretty good.  Laura and I were, at this point, trying to figure out a good rhythm for paddling together in our two-person kayak.  At times, I thought we were doing poorly and we were the last kayak to catch up with our group, but there was at least one single paddler out there who seemed totally, well, at sea with the whole thing.

We saw much pretty scenery and wildlife, and thank you, Laura, for bringing a waterproof digital camera, because my pictures on the little plastic thing probably won't get developed until ... hey, does anyone still develop film?

Here's us, btw.  I am fairly easy to spot as the idiot with the plastic, film camera uselessly hanging 'round my neck.

We did, actually, go into a cave.  The entrance was a bit choppy, but the nice folks from the kayak shop handled it quite safely -- they sent us in one (kayak) at a time, with one of our guides standing in the water outside the cave and physically pushing each kayak around the corner and through the difficult waves at the entrace.  Small cave, two sea lions inside.  No photos from there as we were focussing on following all safety instructions and getting out without ramming the kayaks (from other shops) coming in from the other direction and the nice snorkellers who were bobbing in the water nearby.

At one point in the tour ... somewhere between that photo at the actual cave, Laura and I got genuinely good at paddling together.  Had to use Much Less Force to get moving at a good clip.  It's all about the synchronicity, and when you get it down, it's really pretty nifty.  We started confidently passing some of the solo paddlers, and I even tried some (slightly more) challenging maneuvering moves, and Laura was right there with me.  Very cool.  After the caves, though, we kind of lost that, because I was starting to get tired (afterward, we were told we paddled for 3 miles) and started losing my form, such as it was.  When I commented on this to Laura, she said that she was still trying to match me stroke for stroke, and I had a good laugh on that.  (You ever watch synchronized diving at the Olympics and see some pair go off where one of them blows the dive so the other one tries to blow it too, so at least they are BOTH doing, like, zero somersaults?  Yeah, that's Laura matching me paddle out to the last buoy.)

We went back into shore one kayak at a time.  The dudes from the shop were pretty happy that they had only one capsize event on the way back in.  Remembering my eyeglasses lost at the bottom of the Pacific from that time, a few years back, when *I* was the one who capsized (in Santa Barbara), I had all kinds of sympathy.

And, after lunch, drove back to work.  Through it all, we talked politics and protest,  working at (and retiring from) the court, friends and family, and how stuff is GREAT but people are even BETTER.

Arriving back at 5:30 and wondering how the hell we'd fit all that in 25 hours.

50 for 50: 18 - Day Spa With Alice

Some time ago, I had a bunch of friends over, told them to bring their calendars, set up a big calendar for my next year, posted a list of the unclaimed 50 for 50 things, and let the magic happen.  Alice signed up for "Day Spa" and chose today.

Turns out today was a really good choice.  Hadn't expected the white supremacists to have been marching in Charlottesville yesterday.  Hadn't expected the nation to be demanding the freakin' President of the United States denounce actual neo-Nazis.  Hadn't expected to be so disappointed in so many of my countrymen.  (I can say that I expected, as a general rule, to be pretty disappointed President Trump, but I hadn't thought -- I really, truly hadn't -- that the whole damn country would be looking expectantly to him to condemn something as indisputably condemnation-worthy as a white supremacist driving his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, and yet...)  Nutshell:  I am depressed by shit I can do nothing about, which threatens long-term peace of mind.  So escaping for a day of indulgence is a really good plan.

Alice and I didn't want to do a standard day spa thing -- where you go and get a massage and get a facial and meet when you're passing in the locker room.  We decided something a little more destinationy:  one Glen Ivy Hot Springs.

Glen Ivy is a bit crowded on a summer Sunday.  By the time we got there (just after 11), we had to park in the "additional parking."  Made our way to reception (after some guy did the mandatory bag check -- and confided that he isn't really security; he does massages later in the day) and checked in.  We got directions on which things to do when, stopped at their little Starbucks (tea!) and made our way to the locker room.

There are a certain amount of, er, out of date statements on the Glen Ivy website.  One of them is the bit where they "respectfully request that you leave all electronic devices turned off.  We encourage a digital detox while at Glen Ivy and therefore we do not provide WiFi."  Much later in the day, we learned that there's WiFi in the Starbucks.  AND we saw damn near everyone had their phones with them.  And, upon getting home, I noticed the map they'd handed me upon check-in encourages you "Instagram your Hot Springs pictures using the hashtag #GLENIVY."  So, "digital detox" my butt, basically.

BUT, we hadn't figured any of this out when we checked in.  So when we got to the locker room, we did the obligatory selfie ...

... and then locked our phones in our lockers.  (I love how Alice is doing the total selfie-model pose, whereas I look like I'm plotting something.)

Glen Ivy recommends a three-step process:  (1)  Mineral Baths (for to open pores); (2)  Club Mud (for to draw impurities out of your skin); and (3) The Grotto (for to moisturize). Honestly, I don't know if any of that shit WORKS, but it's an experience and it's fun, so I'm in.

The Mineral Baths are a few small pools -- really small pools (most of them take a max of two people, and there was a larger one you could cram about 15 into) which smell like sulfur and tarnish your silver jewelry.  All the two-person ones were taken, so we joined the group in the 15-people one.  They had air jets going, so sulfurous water was bubbling up all around us, and the whole experience was part soothing and part ... toxic cleanup site?

We did not spend long in the mineral baths.

We moved on to "Club Mud."

(Another lie on the Glen Ivy website is the suggestion to bring your own towel.  There's towels everywhere.  In fact, you have to toss your (locker room) towel upon entry to Club Mud and use a special Club Mud towel.  Because Mud.)

Club Mud is an area of the spa where there's a pool of (muddy) water and, on a stand in the center, a big ol' pile of red clay mud.  You go in the water to get yourself wet, and then slather on the mud.  Cover pretty much everything not covered by your swimsuit.  (I avoided my face, because of the specs, but, yeah, that's an option.)  They then have a nice warm room (but not as toasty as outside) where you can sit and wait for your mud to dry. At this point, I speculated that there's people in the Glen Ivy Executive Dining Room, watching us on a secret webcam, adjusting their monocles, and heartily laughing, "Can you believe we got them to PAY US to cover themselves in mud?!!"

Now, there is one special thing we got to take part in.  Usually, you just shower off the mud, but they were offering a little treat called "Sudsy Mud."  Sudsy Mud involved some guy (probably the same dude doing security checks when he's not doing this) spraying you with a high pressure hose blasting soap.  We watched Sudsy Mud guy blast two women before us, and, when he was done, NOW they were covered with Mud AND white foam.  I wasn't really sure WHAT was in that hose, but I imagined it was akin to the stuff in a fire extinguisher.  We HAD to do that.

I again regret that our phones were in the locker.  (We later noticed, when he was spraying the people after us, he had the hose in one hand and their camera in the other.)  So you're just going to have to imagine what we looked like.  Soggy.  Giggling.  Foam everywhere.  Mud underneath it.  Imagine a gentle, skin-friendly version of tarring and feathering.

The only thing for it are the Club Mud showers and, yes, the sudsy soap made the mud removal pretty easy.

We had some time before our Grotto reservations, so went back to the Starbucks (more tea!) and then off to the Grotto.

Well, no, wait.  Actually, I had to take a bathroom break.  (I mentioned all the tea, right?)  I was wearing a one-piece swimsuit, so using the bathroom required, well, taking the whole damn thing off, and resulted in me very nearly saying aloud, "Holy Hell, how did mud get THERE?!"  The entire front of my swimsuit is lined with white fabric, and quite a bit of the inside lining was now brown in color.  Lovely.  Good thing I'd followed the website's directions and brought a swimsuit I didn't care very much about at all.

The Grotto is an underground experience taking place in four rooms.  In room one, you stand in a little alcove while a woman with a paint brush paints you front and back (wherever your swimsuit isn't) with some green moisturizing body masque.  Then she has you hold out your hands and pours the rest of the bowl of goo out into them, telling you to apply it wherever you want (except your forehead, so it doesn't drip in your eyes).  Then you move into room two, a darkish, peaceful, warm place with benches, where you're supposed to sit for 10 minutes and continue to massage that crap into your person.

I said "benches."  I lied.  The theme of the Grotto is an underground cavern, so the benches are stone and rough-hewn to seem like stalagmites that have gotten out of hand and connected themselves.  The problem is that they are sloped downward toward the floor.  And the backs of your thighs, I might have mentioned, are covered in slippery goo.  I sat on one of the benches and gingerly put my feet up on it.  In what HAD to be a badly-thought-out move, while massaging the masque into my legs, I also took some of my leftover goop and massaged it into my feet.  The bottoms of my feet.  So we're here for another 10 minutes, and while I'm having a nice chat with Alice, part of my brain is flashing back to High School Physics, mentally drawing vectors of all the forces working on me -- the tilt of the bench, the lack of friction between my feet and the bench... and the odds of me staying on the bench seem so slim, I have a vision of the alternate universe where I slide off the bench and end up a green-goop covered puddle on the floor.

As time passes and staying seated seems to be winning the day, we decide to (gingerly) move on to the third room, which is showering the goo off.  (Alice holds the door open for me.  How the hell they expect ANYONE to hold the door handle, after having had goo poured in their hands, is beyond me.)  Sufficiently de-gooed (the mud had actually been easier to remove), we moved on to the last room:  tranquil rest area.  (Even more tea!  And apples!)  I quite liked the tranquil rest area.  It was tranquil.  (And restive.  And an area.)  But Glen Ivy was very busy that day; we couldn't even find two open deck chairs in Club Mud.  Here it was nice and cool and peaceful and uncrowded and QUIET.  And we talked.  About Charlottesville.  About what good people CAN do about it.  About what some people are doing already.  And there, in the tranquil rest area of the underground grotto, it didn't seem so insurmountable anymore.

Yeah, then we got massages.  Because, fuck it, it's a day spa.  :)

Before leaving, there was, of course, the obligatory shower.  Upon stripping off the swimsuit I discovered that the brown stains on the lining were now joined by greenish stains on the lining.  My God, this swimsuit looks like I had a food poisoning incident of epic, EXPLOSIVE proportions.  I feel kind of bad for my lousy Costco swimsuit -- I never intended it to live longer than this, but what a way to go.