Friday, January 7, 2005:

The weather in San Diego was not doing much to make us want to stay. It was a driving rainstorm all day – several inches of rain throughout Southern California . To save on parking, we decided to rent a car near our house and return it at LAX. When we come home, we'll do the opposite. The car we rented had questionable brakes, bad windshield wipers, and made Justin's back hurt in record time.

The drive up to LAX was much better than expected until we got on the 405. There was an accident in the carpool lane, and it took us about an hour and a half to go 5 miles. The rest of the drive was uneventful, except for the usual rush of driving in the carpool lane, with one foot of shoulder and then a big concrete wall, with blinding lights from the other side of the highway right in your face, only this time with the added bonus of heavy rain.

At the airport, we got in line for Cathay Pacific, and we were seemingly the only ones without a half dozen big brown boxes along with our luggage. Apparently there are two flights out of LAX to Hong Kong each night, and since we were there early enough they wanted to put us on the earlier flight. This seemed like a good idea, and I guess everything worked out in the end, but the “early” flight ended up leaving at the same time as the late one, because even though we were all there and the plane was there, the pilot was late. Maybe he was stuck on the 405.