Turning a chapter

Photo by Patrick Jones. Sunset at Santa Monica, 6 December 2017.

On Wednesday I arrived back in Los Angeles after flying across the International Dateline from Tonga and Fiji. I landed to the scenes of multiple brushfires in the hills surrounding LA, with some of the worst air quality I can remember in the city. It was a sad sight. Photos of the fires in the Sepulveda Pass near the Getty Museum & along the 405 looked to be straight out of a movie. Earlier in the week I had planned on visiting the Getty after my arrival, but those plans were changed and the museum was closed, along with other mandatory evacuations in the area. The smoke and haze can be seen in my photo below from Wednesday.

Photo by Patrick Jones. Smoke & haze from the Thomas Fire.

Prior to my trip to the Pacific, we had closed on the sale of our condo in Santa Monica. This meant the end of a chapter in our life as property owners in California. We had needed to sell the place for years, but with good tenants living there we held onto the condo. While this development is mostly a very good thing, it is still a little sad to see our immediate ties to the state end. California has become an adopted home, my West Coast home. The sale of the condo does not end these feelings, and I will continue to travel back to LA for work on a regular basis.

In many ways, this change is not much different from others in my family history who have lived in California temporarily, from my 5th-great-grandfather Francisco Suastegui in 1835 to my parents in the late 1960s. California will always feel like home.

Photo by Patrick Jones. Above LA, 7 Dec 2017.

Now that I am back, I will catch up on blog posts missed during travels in November.