Trip to California

On Friday evening, June 27, Grandpa Lange, Claudia, and I took a Southwest flight from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles. Paul, Eliza, and Peter kindly drove us to the airport.

Our flight arrived nearly a half hour early in Los Angeles, which was fortunate because it took us as long to drive from the airport to our destination in La Crescenta as it had taken to drive from our home in Bountiful and then fly to California. We had to catch the airport shuttle to the Alamo car rental place, pick up a rental car (and then pick up a second one because the plates on the first one expired in May), and then find the right freeway (which happened to be south on I-405, east on I-105, north on I-110 through downtown Los Angeles, north on I-5, north on California 2, and finally west on I-210). At that late hour we did not expect traffic to be so heavy, but it was nearly a parking lot at times as we approached downtown and just beyond.

We were spending the night with Janice's parents, Wally and Ann Anderson, who generously offer their home for us to stay in whenever we come down to visit David and Janice. We arrived there at 11:30 p.m. California time (or 12:30 our time), and Ann was dutifully waiting up for us so she could lock up the house after we were safely in.

The purpose for our weekend trip was to celebrate Stuart's return after two years as a missionary in the Illinois Peoria Mission. He had arrived home on Thursday of the week before, the same day his younger sister Rachel graduated from high school. The next day David and Janice took Stuart through a session in the Los Angeles Temple and then David and Stuart went surfing.

We spent much of Saturday visiting first with Wally and Ann, who kindly fixed us breakfast, and then much of the rest of the day with David and Janice and their family. Tony and Jessica came up from San Diego, where they live with their two boys (Tanner and Ben) about two hours south of David and Janice. Adam and Joanna were there from Glendale, Arizona, a five-to-six-hour drive away, with their little two-year-old Kate. They are expecting their second child, a boy, sometime in August. Drew and Erica live nearby in La Crescenta, perhaps ten minutes away, and they are expecting their first child in early December. Stuart and Rachel will both be going to BYU this fall, and Heather, Brooke, and Annee are still at home.

On Sunday morning we attended church in the Verdugo Hills Ward and heard Stuart report his mission in sacrament meeting. He did a fine job. Just before he spoke, Jessica and Rachel sang "Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing," one of my favorite hymns.

We spent the rest of Sunday, after the three-hour block of meetings, visiting with David, Janice, and their family. When David, Janice, Stuart, and Rachel left to go to another sacrament meeting, we drove back up to Ann and Wally's to take a nap but ended up helping them set up for the family dinner that was scheduled for four o'clock. It was a delightfully pleasant day, a little too warm if you had to be out in the sun for any period of time, just right if you were in the shade. It was good to see some of Janice's side of the family again.

In the evening the crowds faded away, and we visited some more with Wally and Ann and a little later with David and Janice, who came back over to the Andersons' house for some final visiting and farewells.

David is going through a tough time right now. He has been unemployed for the past five weeks and has now lived through the month's severance pay he received when he was let go. He has a lot of feelers out, and a couple of leads, but nothing concrete yet in the troubled times that the construction sector is now going through in California. Many days look bleak. In addition to looking for work, he plans to spend the coming months sprucing up his home in the event he needs to relocate. If he can actually sell it in a slow market, he thinks it is probably worth something approaching three-quarters of a million dollars. Incredible.

We went to bed a little earlier so we could wake up before four o'clock Monday morning to drive back to the airport, return the rental car, and catch our 6:30 flight home to Utah. When we got in the lengthy line of passengers trying to make their way through the security checks, we wondered if we would actually catch our plane, but we did. (Interestingly, my newly implanted heart monitor set off the machines in Salt Lake as we were leaving there Friday evening, but it did not cause any beeping this morning as I went through security in Los Angeles.)

Shauna and the three youngest of her six children (Andrew, Ethan, and Marta) picked us up at the airport after we arrived in Salt Lake. It had been a quick but delightful reunion with Claudia's side of the family.