Soñando con California*

Planning, arranging and booking my upcoming trip to California (I'll be waking up in Santa Barbara two weeks from today!) has sort of occupied my mind and is dominating my time. Everything is arranged though, and I'm really looking forward to it. As I've said in the past, I haven't been home in 13 years and there are old friends I haven't seen in thrice that.

I'll be leading rather the gypsy life while I'm out there: 3 days in Santa Barbara, 2 days in Solvang, 3 days in Ventura, 3 days in Thousand Oaks, and 2 days between Ventura and Santa Barbara... there's the map to illustrate my trip. Click to embigiate.

I'll be very busy while I'm out there: visiting friends, going to band gigs, revisiting some of my old stomping grounds and attending BandTree IV, so I've arranged to spend my last two nights at my favorite little inn, which is located on a small cliff right on the Pacific. After all the hustle and bustle, it'll be healing and restful to sleep with the sound of the surf outside my window, and to spend a couple of days reading, writing and vegetating only 10 feet from the waves.

The extreme drought, the triple-digit heat, the recent prairie fires, health issues, and a number of interpersonal emergencies have made this trip not only welcome, but also necessary; it's been a literal hell here this summer. I didn't think it could get worse than last year, but I was wrong about that. It's a dangerous place to live, not only physically, but emotionally and psychically, and my nervous system has taken about all it can handle. I look forward to this trip as a way to clear my head and to gain a fresh, new perspective about life, thus springboarding me into the next phase.

I'll be posting lots of stories and pictures here, as well as on my California Dreamin' blog and Facebook. Until then, you probably won't see much of me because I have songs to learn and interviews to write, and only two weeks to do that in.

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* Sorry if that's an incorrect translation. My Spanish isn't what it used to be.