The Vacation Starts...

Storm at the airport

I've left the wife and one kid at home, to accompany the other on a four-day trip to Anaheim, California as part of a "Heritage Festival" choir competition. To say I have mixed feelings about this trip is to understate the problem: no merit is needed to go, only money, and no merit is earned on the trip except a routine of grades.

Even the trip itself seems more like a sham competition with an expensive vacation attached. On the one hand, I salute the school's attempt to teach the students some independence; on the other, a few hours of performance and instruction attached to two days of the beach, Disneyland, and California Adventure, doesn't seem very educational to me. I can't help but contrast Storm's experience to Kouryou-chan's, when she hied off to Washington DC with her class: every day they were studying something, learning something, visiting somewhere important.

The airport was farily routine. Even the TSA was completely professional, and the security not entirely onerous. Apparently I'm not on the no-fly list. The three girls I'm chaperoning are all 7th-graders, cheerful and ordinary, one very quiet and reserved, the others vivacious and social.

Oh, and one of the flight attendants is name Ilonca. How cool is that? Sadly, she is not blonde.

We arrived in LAX without incident. I'd forgotten just how huge Los Angeles is. Grief, the infrastructure goes on for miles and miles and miles without end. It's not like the PNW at all, with its tiny cores and friendly suburbs. It's just one humongous city, a gigantic grid that fades into the distance.