After my first Christmas at home in three years, Zack and I drove down to San Diego to see Jon and Sam. We made the mistake of departing on the day after Christmas, and got stuck in an apparently unprecedented traffic jam on I-5 south of its junction with Highway 152. After about thirty miles, we learned that the gridlock did NOT extend the 200+ miles to LA, much to our relief. We could only surmise that the influx of traffic from the Bay Area was so great as to locally create a traffic jam which then dissipated a little ways down the highway. Total travel time, including breaks, was over 10 hours.

As a true Bay Area native, I have hardly ever spent any time in southern California. It was my first visit to San Diego since I was 4. We went to the San Diego Zoo and to Torrey Pines State Reserve (a grove of endemic Torrey pines, Pinus torreyana, which grow only there and on Santa Rosa Island), to downtown La Jolla, and to Coronado (where Sam's mom gave us the most awesome tour ever!). The Mexican food in San Diego is excellent. The interesting thing about San Diego is its pattern of growth. Unlike most other big California cities, which follow a pattern of continuous development on flat areas that stops where there are mountains, San Diego has few huge mountains nearby, but lots of little hills. So there are hills with stuff on top but not on the sides, and on one side but not on the other, and at the base but not on top, etc. It gives the impression that sprawl is barely regulated, and there's a lot of land left for sprawl. You hear a lot about the "wildland-urban interface" in southern California, particularly in the context of wildfires spreading into urban areas. I didn't really understand this concept until I saw suburban San Diego. I do have to wonder if sprawl is so patchy in San Diego because people intrinsically value scrublands less than forests as open space.

On our drive back we took a somewhat circuitous route around LA to avoid traffic. The haze over LA was the same color as that over Kuala Lumpur when I went there in February. (Yes, I admit, there were forest fires outside KL when I visited, and marine haze naturally blows over LA from the ocean.) Zack and I reached agreement that the southern Californian habit of using articles with freeway numbers (such as "the 5", "the 101", etc.) is the dumb.

But I will visit Dan in Pasadena next month, so I will have nice things to say about LA after that.

I was planning on spending a quiet New Year's Eve here in Berkeley and maybe eat toshikoshi soba (buckwheat noodles) around 11:30 pm as I used to do in Japan, but Ken called asking if I want to go see the fireworks in San Francisco. We'll be taking BART into the city once he gets here. Hopefully it won't be too crowded...happy 2006 everyone!