I flew with a friend of mine down to your neck of the chaparral on Saturday morning to visit some mutual friends. He's the pilot, in case you're wondering. From our altitude of 3000-6000 feet I saw many square miles of tract homes built on ridges that had been flattened out to make room for the homes. And I saw still more huge developments in various stages of construction. Someday you folks down in SoCal are going to run out of ridges to build on!
I also found the airspace around LA and San Diego to be nerve-wracking, with so many flights of all sorts, and lots and lots of radio traffic. My hat's off to both pilots and air traffic controllers, because they're doing a very difficult job and for the most part doing it very well.
Our friends live less than 20 miles from the Mexican border, right on one of the main routes for illegal alien traffic. And when I say "right on" I mean it quite literally. Their fruit trees get stripped every so often, and they showed us some trails on their property that were created by human, not animal, traffic.
Kind of related, but sort of a change in subject:
Today, my wife and I made our first purchase ever at Walmart. Our checkout line was surprisingly slow given the quantity of items the people in front of us were buying, but when our turn finally arrived I learned why. The clerk in our line didn't speak English, and had to ask another clerk for linguistic assistance a handful of times. My disgust was not well disguised. |
