Cody’s blog

This past week, I went to Long Beach to attend a two-day teaching event by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. It was hosted by the Geden Shoeling Center and held at the Long Beach Convention Center.

I found out about it through my temple, Mountain Spirit Center. Someone had photocopied a stack of ticket requests and left them on the table by the kitchen door. At first, I thought it sounded great, but figured it would be too expensive to go, since I’d have to stay in a hotel for at least two days. Then, the very next week, I got an email from the Westin Long Beach hotel, where we stayed when I ran in the Long Beach Half Marathon, advertising special $109 a night rates for trips through the end of September. Perfect! I went ahead and reserved a room for Thursday and Friday nights, and sent for my tickets.

The teaching was scheduled for two sessions on Friday, at 9:30 am and 2 pm, and one on Saturday morning at 9:30 am. I drove down Thursday afternoon so I’d be rested and ready to go Friday morning.

Theoretically, anyway. Thursday turned out to be a long, exhausting day. I hadn’t slept well to begin with, and then I decided at the last minute that I couldn’t leave the house in such a mess for my mom, who stays at my place to take care of the cats and fish while I’m gone, so I spent a couple of hours cleaning. Then a couple of hours packing. Then cleaned the fish tank, my usual Thursday chore. Then packed some more. I was only going to be gone for two days! You wouldn’t think it would be so hard to pack. Yet I always manage to forget at least one thing I need. (Once, it was socks. I wore the same socks for three days. Once it was scissors and tape for my bandages. I ended up buying a box of bandaids at the hotel gift shop and cutting the adhesive strips from them with my pocket knife.) This time, the one thing I forgot was a sweater or long-sleeved shirt. I knew it would be warm in Long Beach, but warm weather often equals cold air conditioning indoors, and I knew perfectly well from my previous stay that the hotel restaurant air conditioning was kept at refrigeration levels.

By the time I was finally ready to hit the road, I just wanted to go back to bed, not get in my truck and drive for three hours. But onward! I left home at around 1:30 pm, made a few stops in town (for gas, money, wash my truck, and to pick up a spare roll of cloth tape for my bandages), then finally headed out.

The drive was fine until I got to the 405 South just before LA. It was stop and go all the way to the 710. I knew that leaving in the afternoon I was going to have to deal with rush hour traffic when I hit LA, but I had no idea just how bad it was going to be. I turned up the stereo and crept along.

Finally arrived at the hotel at around 6 pm. What should have been at most a three hour drive took four and a half hours. I checked in, called my mom, set up my computer and tried to get online. Couldn’t get the Ethernet to connect, so, after restarting the modem and the computer and fussing with diagnostics, I finally called guest services. Thankfully, a very nice engineer came fairly quickly to replace the modem and make sure I was up and running. I promptly took the opportunity to catch a yellow dino egg from the Dragon Cave. Yay!

Then I grabbed some dinner in the hotel restaurant (where I froze in the air conditioning without a sweater) and collapsed for the night. Not a terribly auspicious start for my trip, but I was in Long Beach!

To be continued