Hi, honey, I’m home!

This has been the second wackiest business trip of my professional career. (None will ever top driving across the United States after September 11. I hope.)

Monday afternoon, the conference organizer sent out an email confirming that we were still having a meeting.

Tuesday morning at around 8:30 am EDT, I got on a plane for San Diego.

Tuesday morning at around 11 am PDT, I smiled at the friendly front desk clerk at the breathtakingly beautiful hotel overlooking the Torrey Pines golf course. And she told me that my conference had been canceled, and did I still want to check in?

Now to be fair, I can see why they canceled it. But man do I wish they would have done that BEFORE I spent 5.5 hours on the plane.

Those fires are no joke. The air was thick and gray and hazy, you could taste the tang of smoke from inside the airport, everyone who worked outside, like the car rental guys, wore dust filtering face masks.

My hotel room could not have been more than ~2000 yards from the Pacific ocean, and I couldn’t see it. I could see where the grass ended, and then everything was murky and gray.

Most of the people in the hotel were families, clearly having evacuated from their homes further east in the San Diego area. There were so many children and dogs; you could see that people’s cars were filled with pictures and other important possessions.

I called and got my return flight changed from 6:30 am on Friday to 6:30 am today.

Because the air quality was so awful, people were advised to stay indoors if at all possible. I did, for at least the next 3 hours. By then I was thoroughly sick of daytime television, my hand was cramping from my recent efforts to remember how to knit, and I had to get the hell out of my hotel room.

So I found a bookstore online in “downtown” La Jolla, which was only a few miles due south, and hopped into the car. On the way, I took a bunch of pictures, including of insane people surfing near UCSD. I also had dinner at a Karl Strauss brewery — an order of chicken nachos that would have been more appropriate for a table of 4. (It does seem like everyone in the world wants you to eat fish tacos in the greater San Diego metro area. Unfortunately, I don’t like fish.)

Between wandering expensive but cute downtown La Jolla and eating dinner, I managed to kill about 3 hours. Then I went back to the hotel and crashed around 7:30 pm local time. Having set my alarm for 3:30 am, to make sure I had lots of time to make it to my 6:30 am flight.

Tomorrow, I’ll try to sync my cell phone to my computer at work and post the crazy pictures of the sky, the ocean, and the sunset in San Diego. (Much particulate matter in the air = spectacular sunset.) Happily, I have no actual fire pictures. That would have been way too scary.