I took a wee trip to Disneyland and now I’m back at my brother’s house. He lives about two miles from the Amtrak station at Grover Beach. There are two trains that run up and down the coast regularly from there. The Very Nice Coast Starlight which runs from Seattle to San Diego, and the Pacific Surfliner which runs from San Luis Obispo to San Diego. Both stop at Los Angeles Union Station and I have traveled on both of them to and from there, but only the Surfliner stops in Anaheim. The biggest problem with the Surfliner is I have to catch it in both directions at an ungodly hour. This time instead of asking my brother to get up at 5:30am to take me to the station I rented a room at a nearby motel I could walk it from. But I still had to be up by 5:30am just to make sure I got dressed and ready to walk to the station before the train got there. In Anaheim I have to cross my fingers that a ride share will pick me up at 5am from a hotel near Disneyland to get me to the station. Which means I need to be up sometime after 4am to dress and make sure I’ve packed everything.

It’s about a six hour ride on the Pacific Surfliner from Anaheim to Grover Beach, and a large segment of that around Vandenberg is kinda boring if you’re not on the ocean side of the train, until you catch sight of the launch facilities there. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of lumpy treeless hills and no cellular data signal for about an hour and a half. I was wishing I’d brought a book along.

A situation at work has been super stressing me out since I got here and I’m going to try one more time to find a resolution to it, otherwise I’m going to need to disappear into my vacation for the rest of the trip and take whatever static I get out of it. I won’t go into details other than remark quietly under my breath that I am ready to retire again. One heart attack and an ablation later I am not up for a lot of stress anymore.

I got not very much relaxation out of my Disney visit, and maybe a big part of that was how crowded the parks were. Also that notification that I had a fifteen hundred dollar hospital bill waiting for me that I wasn’t expecting. But I should consider myself lucky health expenses wise. I asked if it was another out of network doctor trying to gouge me (this has happened before) and the hospital said no it wasn’t a doctor charge but a hospital charge. I’m still going to run it my my health insurer.

My Disney visit was good…I adore California Adventure…but I am still just as stressed as I was before I went. On the other hand…I’m back in California…so there’s that.