Barely off Delta’s Nice/Amsterdam/Portland flight (vacated by Northwest post ticket purchase and now code shared with KLM and Air France… really! ) when handed a ticket to Long Beach, CA along with instructions to disburse among a half dozen farms, a container load of Flowerbud’s acrylic vases that are painfully late in from China. The approach into Long Beach takes us above the billowing smoke from the still rampant blaze that is the Station Fire, an arson caused conflagration in some foothills east of LA. Of all the LA area airports used by me this past decade, Long Beach has never counted among them, until now. To say the least it is small, quaint almost. Eminently manageable and as far from what one might imagine an airport in Los Angeles to be as possible. No frill, no flash and quite some number of trailers operating as peoples offices. California continues showing us that the 31st state is in a state of penury… the first of many such glimpses I catch through the dried up and weedy landscaping, the endless trash blowing roadside, and for the next 1975 miles, feel… as I bounce through potholes and thump over misaligned bridge expansion joints and collapsed concrete in freeway lanes. (more…)