no shoes... yes service

you gotta love any state where you can drive barefoot and where you can drive your motorcycle to the front of the pack in between cars at stoplights. not only that, but you can even drive around and in-between cars in motion, granted traffic is moving 40 mph or less. it makes for an exiting animation of vehicles on the road. it also beats watching the DC motorcyclists walk their bikes home on route 123 in rush hour.

the past few nights have been really peaceful. drix showed up first, on thursday. he is a manager of a stadium in cape town and he, along with the other south africans, are here to construct and man several aspects of an annual mountain bike race at laguna seca. drix brought some great south african wine that we consumed over a great steak dinner. yum!

last night, rheta showed up. she's pretty cool too. each year, she ditches her entire family for 2 weeks to come run some of the stands at the bike event. her husband is a brandy maker and all her kids are either professional cyclists, or on their way to becoming professional cyclists.

so late yesterday afternoon we put the top down on the solstice and rheta and i drove to whole foods in monterey to get some stuff for dinner. it was really refreshing to be greeted in whole foods by so many friendly people. i'm used to walking into a grocery store and not being spoken to.

we were near the salads and this lady almost put her food in our cart. when she realized she didn't have a cart and indeed had a basket, she let out a hearty hilary clinton chuckle and apologized. she continued to ask us questions about our visit and went on to talk about all the things going on in monterey this weekend, including the 5 minute rant about leonardo dicaprio's new movie that's playing for free and is really awesome because it talks about providing environmental solutions rather than focusing on the saddening environmental problems accumulating in our world today. little does she know that if i see it, its obvi only going to be for leo.

it actually got to be too much after the 2nd or 3rd event she told us about. my smile was more in response to her persistence in making us feel welcome than it was to the coolness of the events she was listing. noticing that her teenage daughter was now completely embarrassed, we really tried to wrap things up. rheta slowly moved towards the salads, and the transitional note was sung.

we needed wassabi, and i felt no remorse interrupting two whole foods employees in the middle of their conversation. as soon as i said "excuse me, can i ask you a question" they both burst out laughing. apparently "excuse me" was the punchline to their joke. really random!

anyways, it was just a nice day yesterday, first with the friendly whole foods people, then with the great driving weather. to top it off, we had king salmon and red potatoes for dinner. so good.

well, about to head out for the day. we needed a bigger car than the solstice for today, cause rheta is coming with us. so cynthia rented a car, and the only car they had was this huge cadillac dts. how cliched, right? whether its just the irony in it being such a [in my mind] typical baller california car, or the irony in us renting the cadillac in time to go to vineyards, its just cliched! but, i'm not complaining. ok. out.

-m-