While parts of America shiver with the onset of winter and others recover from the holidays, Caroline and I are off taking our first trip of 2022. We are traveling west across the Arizona desert to an old, familiar place.

Yep, right into California we drove, and what a long drive it’ll be, or so it felt. It was 3:45 p.m., just moments before this selfie, and though we just shaved an hour off our time because entering the Pacific Time Zone jumped us back to 2:45, it would be nearly 9:00 p.m. before reaching our lodging over near Santa Monica.

Like the romance of yore, we travel west into the sunset after a quick stop for a snack at Popeye’s Louisiana Kitchen in Blythe, along with coffees from Starbucks, as the convenience of modern adventures should be fully indulgent. For those who know about our reading books while we head down the highway, Caroline continued with a blog from someone who’s summarizing Marcel Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time to ensure that we are getting all we can from this reading of such a long book. It’s unlikely we’ll be able to afford a second reading of this 1.2-million-word tome. After catching up with the summary to the end of book 1, we returned to the novel, of which there are still six more volumes to go.

I’ll have to don my hypocrite hat for this admission. Coming from “Mr. Contradiction,” who is forever telling anyone who’ll listen to my ad nauseam repetitions of do-as-I-say advice, here we are stopping at Mix Bowl off Indian Hill Blvd in Pomona, California, which, according to a 2019 report, is only one of 29,560 restaurants in the greater Los Angeles area. But we keep going back; why, though? It’ll hurt my fingers to admit this as I type it out: nostalgia plays a large role. Some 25 years ago, we stumbled upon this place when it was named Big Bowl (legal problems forced the name change); well, we loved it so much we returned on subsequent visits and now seem to need to stop at least once on the way in or out of Southern California. We did “Mix” it up this visit, though, by ordering two new dishes out of three.

This is our little bungalow motel on Wilshire Blvd we’ve stayed at maybe a dozen prior visits to the area. We are only 3.5 miles from the Santa Monica Pier on the Pacific Ocean, and while we’d be smart to head right down, we’re tired after the 400-mile drive on a Friday afternoon that included a fair amount of traffic, the longest line we’ve ever seen at an In-N-Out Burger up the street from Mix Bowl, that snack-and-coffee break I mentioned, and of course, a stop for gas. With nothing left to share, we’ll turn this down and head to sleep so we might get an early start with the rising sun come morning.