Life is a Highway: Exit 3

Pageant of Disasters

710 to LAGUNA BEACH

After the success of Santa Barbara, I was riding high on road trip hubris, and told my sister I thought it was a good idea to take a day trip to Laguna Beach with her, her fiancée, and my child. She expressed some skepticism, it still being Fourth of July weekend, but I insisted that it would be easy. Do you know how to guarantee something will not be easy? Tell someone it will be easy.

I chose Laguna beach because I hadn’t been there in my adult life and it’s supposed to be beautiful, as we all learned from the cultural watershed Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County. Though I was not a rich, tan, teenager, living two decades in the past, why shouldn’t I get to experience what L.C. and Kristen experienced, if only for an afternoon?

The trip started out painlessly enough—little traffic on the 710, a highway that isn’t always beautiful, per se, but full of things to see. As you get further south it gets closer to some lovely stretches of Southern California that probably exist in your mind’s eye—chaparral stretching to rocky coastline, a reminder of the untold beauty that we destroyed by living here. Smooth sailing. Until we got to our exit.

So many cars. So many people. So many people and cars. So many cars and people. And they were all headed to the same place, a place where we unfortunately were also going.

One thing I hadn’t quite thought about was the fact that Laguna Beach has several different arts festivals in the summer months, and every single one seemed to be in full swing at once. Perhaps the most infamous festival is The Pageant of the Masters, a barrage of elaborate makeup trickery and clever costuming in which models pose in life-size recreations of famous paintings. Honestly, something I’d love to see one day if it didn’t mean returning to Laguna Beach.

After disagreeing about where to park for forty-five minutes, we ended up on a hill on what I could tell was the far side of town, even though I’d never been to the town before. I filled the meter with what might be the most money I’ve ever spent on municipal parking. It was time to head to the beach.

The beach, a twenty minute march past stores selling surfboards and sneakers and smoothies, was covered wall to wall with all the people from all the cars we had seen earlier. In an added complication, we had my sister’s one thousand year old dog Maybelline with us, and dogs are simply not allowed on O.C. beaches during the daytime in the summertime, even if they’re one million years old and mostly relegated to a dog stroller or my sister’s arms. Since my spirit had long been broken, I suggested just staying there and committing to it being bad. My sister, ever the maximizer, insisted we find a better beach, and walked back up the hill to our car on the other side of the town to pick us up.

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: Wall-to-wall umbrellas on Laguna Beach.

We drove some more. There was still not a lot of readily available parking, so my sister dropped us off and we headed down a hill to a beach that was better than the original beach and slightly less crowded, so some small victory had been won. Once there, the child immediately got down to the important work of either eating sand or trying to run directly into the ocean. In my pre-parental life, getting to the beach was always annoying but once you arrived at the beach it could be quite relaxing. Now being at the beach is annoying, too, which is an interesting turn of events.  

We left after an hour so, and as we did a huge wave came in and knocked several children and at least one baby (not my baby) flat down on their faces. Everyone survived but it felt like a the ocean asking everyone to leave it alone.

The daughter, full of sand, fell asleep on the way home. She woke up again when we stopped at an In-n-Out so she could wash down all her sand with most of my strawberry milkshake. She stayed awake until we got home and for a good hour after, which was already two hours past her normal bedtime.

All of this is to say: I’m never leaving home again.