March 2, 2020, sticks out in my mind for many reasons. I was ticketed to fly from Portland, Oregon, to Santa Ana, California, to work with a handful of clients at Natural Products Expo West at the Anaheim Convention Center. It was a work trip that would normally be filled with long days working with clients and walking the show floor at the nation’s biggest tradeshow for natural products.
But you know what was going on in March of 2020, don’t you? Yeah, that.
Due to the pandemic, out of the nine exhibitors that I had intended to work with, at least half had pulled out within the previous four or five days. The news was coming fast and furious, and I was in the midst of packing, answering emails and texts, and getting ready to drive to Portland when I decided to heat up another cup of coffee. It didn’t turn out well. Seems that the material Hydro Flask uses in their cup production doesn’t want to be microwaved:
Talk about being distracted!
Given the state of the world, my wife and I discussed whether I should go on the trip. It was a real question because the show was not going to happen. What would I do without the show? That was my sole reason for going. But the flight, rental car, and Airbnb were paid for, and it didn’t make sense to not use something that was already paid for and the likelihood of getting any of that money back didn’t seem good. Might as well go. A few hours later, as I sat on the PDX tarmac, waiting to take off, I checked my email one last time and discovered that the show was being canceled. By then, I wasn’t surprised.
Once in LA, I worked with the clients who had not come to the show to get all of their crates shipped to where they needed to go. Once that was done, I had about five days with nothing on my calendar! Sheesh, what a wild gift of time.
Playing Tourist in LA
Long story short, I made a mini-vacation of it. I went to Griffith Park. I visited my cousin working at a radio group on Sunset Blvd. I had lunch with a couple of old pals, one of whom suggested I visit the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, which is a few miles from his home, so I did. Another suggested that I spend a day driving to Joshua Tree National Park, which I did. On the way from Santa Ana to Joshua Tree, I passed the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and stopped there. Both libraries were well done and didn’t pull any punches about the shambles they made of things at times. I was really glad I went.
Naturally, I took a lot of photos at all of the stops, but there’s a set of photos I’m going to share with you in a moment that came out of a morning walk that really made the trip wonderful and memorable.
The Fairies of Santa Ana
One of those days with nothing on my schedule was March 6th. The day after I visited Joshua Tree, I went for a walk in the neighborhood. A couple of blocks from the Airbnb, I came upon a block that was nicely coiffed, not a speck of grass or palm tree out of place (actually, most of Santa Ana is like that, it seems), and saw something a little odd:
At the base of a tree, there was what seemed to be a door, with a small path of red rocks leading up to it. The tree base was surrounded by small rocks, and there was another small building next to the tree. Wow, how clever! I snapped a photo with my phone.
At the next tree, I came across another mini-diorama of a similar ilk.
In fact, the whole street was decorated with small fairy-size displays:
It made me smile, particularly in light of how the pandemic was taking over everyone’s newsfeeds and minds. Seeing a small oasis of playful constructions made me realize that there were still whimsical and somewhat mischievous people at work.
I probably posted some photos on Facebook, but here’s the whole batch. Hope you enjoy them as much as I did.
So yes, I got to hang out with some of my favorite people. I visited Griffith Park and snapped photos of the Hollywood sign. I went to two presidential libraries that I’ll probably never return to. It was a fun trip.
But with the pandemic just starting and the next few months or years uncertain as to how it would all turn out, stumbling on a small world of fairies in Santa Ana still brings a smile.