A couple of days ago, I asked a buddy of mine back in Cincinnati, somewhat facetiously, if I led the most exciting life of anyone that he knows. His instant reply was “Definitely!”
Exciting life? Maybe an even better way of saying it would be unusual or unconventional. Just this morning my wife, Carol said “With you, you never know”. I admit that I do lead a somewhat unusual lifestyle.
I frequently tell people that I’ve never taken a trip, and I take forty fairly big trips every year, that I didn’t like. Things almost always go the way I expect.
However, once in a blue moon (blue moons normally happen every 2 or 3 years), I will have a trip where a series of things don’t go the way I wanted them to go. That requires a little bit of self-discipline on my part to not become too disappointed and to have a backup plan at the ready. I always say, “I get to choose my reaction to whatever comes my way”.
Please remember this as you read my story. This is not a story about a basketball game. It is a story about the perils of travel with a little bit of finance thrown in. As you read about my experiences try to think about how you would have handled things.
I just got back from Las Vegas. Several elements of this trip did not go the way I wanted them to go. Would you mind if I told you about the situation?
Carol, I, and our son J.J. are huge fans of UCLA sports, specifically basketball, and football. I’m sure you probably already knew that the word “fan” is short for fanatic.
We just don’t read the newspaper or check the box score the next morning online for UCLA sports. We go to the games. As a season ticket holder for UCLA basketball, we drive two hours one-way in heavy-duty Southern California rush-hour traffic to get to the arena. Then it’s another hour or more to get back home late at night. We do this for 20 games a year. We also travel during the season to watch UCLA games. In 2024 UCLA will move from the Pac-12 conference to the Big Ten. Bill Walton calls that a “truckstop” conference. It will be fun to visit all of those new venues, mainly in the Midwest.
In the past few years, UCLA has had some very good basketball teams. Of course, over the entire history of NCAA basketball UCLA is the most successful program winning 11 NCAA basketball championships. However, our last championship was back in 1995. We’re hoping to get one more very soon.
I do get a bit irritated when someone mentions that we haven’t won in a long time. Is a championship in 1971 any less valuable than a championship in 2021? I don’t think so.
With all of that being said, this weekend I was making a somewhat unconventional trip to Las Vegas. UCLA was playing in the NCAA tournament’s Sweet 16. The hope was for UCLA to win a couple of NCAA tournament games. If they did UCLA would advance to the Final Four in Houston Texas. If UCLA was going to play in Houston we would be in Texas next weekend!
Just to be clear if you’re not into sports that much don’t worry. This is NOT a message about UCLA basketball. It is a message about trips!
UCLA would play on Thursday night and if they won, again on Saturday. With both J.J. and I being season-ticket holders, we submitted a request to UCLA for NCAA tournament tickets. J.J.’s seniority/status for these tickets is much better than mine. He ended up getting two tickets. I was shut out.
The face value for these tickets was going to be $200 each. J.J. was committed to going to the game with Dustin so that left me on my own to get tickets.
I know what you might be thinking. You’ve heard me talk in the past about simply arriving at a sporting event without a ticket and using my “need one” sign to get a ticket. This is NOT that story. The effectiveness of my need one sign at certain venues has decreased because of Covid. Covid?
That’s right. During Covid, sporting events went from paper tickets to electronic tickets. Pre-Covid it was a lot easier to find someone with a paper ticket. With electronic tickets, it’s not as easy to “transfer” the ticket from one person to the next. Not everyone is completely comfortable with the technology that makes something like that happen. I have been known to simply “walk-in” with the person I am buying the ticket from. I give them the cash once I’m inside. The bottom line is that electronic ticketing has diminished the effectiveness of my need one sign.
This being the case a few days before Thursday’s game, I started going online to see what ticket broker services had to offer. These were some of the places I checked. StubHub, SeatGeek, and Vivid Seats, among others.
These sites are selling tickets that individuals own. The tickets are either not needed or the owners are selling their tickets to make a profit. This generally means prices are higher than the face value price.
I went about checking these ticket sites hundreds if not, thousands of times over a period of a few days. The prices held steady for the most part. Then a day before the game they seemed to drop a bit. Then on game day, they shot up!
The game would be played at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. T-Mobile opened in 2016 and seats 18,000 fans for basketball. We’ve seen several games played there.
I commonly tell you that I want to “buy good things cheap and not bad things cheap”. Sometimes good things are hard to get cheaply. In Las Vegas that is certainly the case. As we go through this discussion you’ll see me trying to practice this adage at every turn. Sometimes I am more successful than at other times.
The T-Mobile Arena essentially has a lower bowl of seats and an upper bowl. They also have a small number of seats that are sort of in the middle between these two levels.
On the ticket sites I was checking the lower bowl seats were selling generally for $1,000 and up per ticket. The upper bowl seats were selling in the range of $300-$400. Do you think those prices are high? It was what it was.
I didn’t want to pay what they were charging for a lower bowl seat. I also didn’t want to pay what they were charging for an upper bowl seat, which would be a long way from the basketball court. This was testing my “I want to buy good things cheap and not bad things cheap” philosophy.
To make a long story, just a bit shorter, I was able to get one of the seats in the middle range between the lower bowl and the upper bowl for a price of $344 per ticket. What made this option important for me was that we were seated in the first row of that section (row A) overlooking the lower bowl seats. For the price, this was an excellent seat.
Have you ever tried to rationalize anything in your life? I do that from time to time. I rationalized the idea that $344 per ticket wasn’t that bad. The face value for the tickets that people could buy in advance was $200. If someone was going to the game and driving from Southern California their gasoline bill round-trip would be about $150.
I was in at $344. Driving my Tesla Model X electric vehicle meant I wouldn’t have any gasoline bill or electric bills at all. I figured that $344 was pretty much the same thing as someone who bought a ticket in advance for $200 and would be facing a gasoline bill of $150. Isn’t it fun to rationalize things?
Granted I paid more for my Tesla than if I had bought a gas-powered car. However, the purchase price of my Tesla is now a “sunk” cost. A sunk cost is money that has already been spent and cannot be recovered. In business, the axiom is that one has to “spend money to make money”.
Someone might be thinking, “Randy, why didn’t you just buy a ticket from the NCAA for $200 in the first place?” The answer is simple. Up until just three or four days before the game was being played in Las Vegas, we didn’t know where UCLA would be playing. They could have been assigned to a region at eight different locations in the country. Since I couldn’t get a ticket from UCLA, there was no way to get face-value tickets in advance.
It was important to have tickets to the game. However, at this point, several of the more complex logistical aspects of this trip would come into play. Some did not work in my favor.
Carol couldn’t make the game on Thursday, but she could come to the game on Saturday if we won. This information would minorly complicate my travel plan.
It’s about a five-hour drive from my home in San Clemente, California to Las Vegas. The driving distance is 290 miles. With all of the rain that southern California has received this year (20 inches this winter and only three inches of rain the year before) it was nice seeing the snow-covered mountains just a couple of hours from our hometown of San Clemente.
When I take a road trip in my Tesla, the GPS is about as slick as anything I have encountered. I simply plug in the destination, in this case, Las Vegas. Then the GPS tells me when, where, and for how long I will need to stop at a supercharger to get to where I’m going.
I could plug in the trip itinerary from San Clemente to New York City and my Tesla GPS would tell me where my next supercharger stop would be and how long I would have to charge. The system tells me at the beginning where all of those recommended stops will be. If the recommendation doesn’t meet where I want to be the system simply recalculates as needed. Is that cool or what?
For my trip to Las Vegas, I started with my “tank” being only half full. The GPS told me I would need to stop twice for a total of 40 minutes.
One of the best things about Tesla superchargers is they are almost always located next to a shopping mall or a major truck stop. At those places, there are restrooms, restaurants, and more.
Some folks will tell me they don’t want a Tesla. What are they really saying? I think it might be this. The cheapest Tesla runs about $50,000 and up from there. Are people saying they don’t want a Tesla or are they saying they don’t want a $50,000 car regardless of whether it’s an electric car or a gas-powered car?
A lot of people are concerned about how long it might take to charge an electric car. I don’t think 40 minutes of stopping during a five-hour drive is all that bad. If you’re making a five-hour drive you’re probably gonna stop at least once and maybe twice to go to the restroom, get something to eat, stretch your legs, and such. If you were driving a gas-powered car, you might do all of that in less than 40 minutes, but you might not.
I have another advantage over folks driving gasoline-powered cars. When I bought my 2020 Tesla Model X there was a special promotion. That promotion gave me free supercharging for the life of the ownership of my car. As I mentioned for this trip, it would cost about $150 for a person to drive the same amount of miles I was covering for the trip to Las Vegas. I wouldn’t pay a single penny for fuel.
For the Thursday game, I was going to be going with a good buddy of mine who lives in Las Vegas. We have known each other since college. When Jim was a freshman, I was his sophomore resident assistant in the dormitory. That means we’ve known each other for nearly 55 years. I am very pleased to still be hanging out with a good friend of mine, whom I have known for that amount of time. That doesn’t happen all that often. By the way, in this photo, Jim was trying out my glasses. Don’t hold that against him!
Oh! One more story about my buddy. His first job in Las Vegas, as a recent college grad, was dealing craps at a major casino. I was coming back from a National Sales Meeting in San Francisco and made my first-ever stop in Las Vegas to visit him. Jim picked me up in a ratty, well-used-up Volkswagen bug. I remember seeing a bank clock showing the temperature being 100 degrees at midnight. Jim took me to his apartment where he had a tape recorder that helped him learn how to deal craps. He was as poor as a church mouse. Heck, Carol and I were just then trying to save $8,000 to get a 20% down payment for a $40,000 house.
Over the years times have certainly changed. My buddy with the beat-up VW bug is now the wealthiest person I personally know. I even made a couple of bucks investing in his real estate developments. Jim and his wife Joan have had the Beach Boys perform in their backyard three times to raise millions of dollars for cancer research. He’s had his own jet. Nevertheless, when we get together it’s just the same as when we were twenty years old and had a combined net worth of whatever was in our pockets. Today is Jim’s birthday. I hope he lives to be 100. And now you know the rest of the story!
I mentioned that Carol would come to the game on Saturday if we won our game on Thursday. That plan and others were where things got a little bit “unusual”.
Hotel prices are very expensive in Las Vegas over a weekend. They are much more reasonable during the week. They say that nearly half of the people in Las Vegas on any given weekend are from Southern California. To make things just a little bit tougher on hotel prices Taylor Swift was performing in Las Vegas on Friday and Saturday nights. The “Swifties” would surely drive up the price of hotels. The Wynn Hotel was going for more than $500/night.
If UCLA won their game on Thursday, the game would be finished by about 9 p.m. If that happened I planned to drive back to San Clemente on Thursday night arriving home at about 2 a.m. This would allow me to be home for a full day on Friday and avoid a hotel expense on Thursday night after the game. Then on Saturday morning Carol and I would drive back to Las Vegas for Saturday evening’s game. Yes, my lifestyle is either exciting or unconventional or maybe you have a different name for it!
However, if UCLA lost, there would be no game for Carol and me on Saturday. The Thursday night game would end at about 9 p.m. If UCLA lost, I would simply drive to the Las Vegas airport and fly to Atlanta and trackchase. Fly to Atlanta? Yes, I would trackchase first in Georgia and then Alabama on Friday and Saturday nights. On Sunday morning, I would fly back from Atlanta to Las Vegas and drive five hours to get home. That’s a bit unusual don’t you think?
I’m the kind of person who is always trying to get an advantage. Does that sound like a good thing to you or not? I don’t know where I learned that.
For some reason, I just think getting an advantage is a good thing. Just a note. I NEVER shoot for an advantage with friends or family. However, if you’re going to get an advantage, I only support those who cleverly get those advantages. I would never want to be part of any “advantage getting” that was anywhere close to being tied with “cheating”. Clever is good. Cheating is bad.
Parking in Las Vegas was going to be expensive. I’ve been to Las Vegas well over 100 times. Up until a few years ago, I could park at any of the big casino parking lots for free. Then the casino owners got wise. They now charge for parking.
I use several different apps to get a deal on parking at big events. One of those apps is ParkWhiz. Parking anywhere near the T-Mobile arena in Las Vegas was going to cost in the range of $50. I went on ParkWhiz and secured parking for just $10. My parking garage was just a seven-minute walk from the stadium.
I told you that not all elements of my trip went perfectly. When I showed up at the parking garage, my QR code wouldn’t scan. I waited for someone to come and help me out while the traffic behind me began to build up. That’s never a comfortable feeling, is it?
Overall, I am not a big fan of Las Vegas in its current state. It is simply too crowded. The place has built up so much since I first started coming here 50 years ago. Much of the time I don’t even know where I am on the strip.
Nevertheless, I was able to meet up with my college buddy, Jim Hammer, for a pregame drink. Jim and I have done a lot together over the years. We still enjoy each other’s company, whenever and wherever we get a chance to meet up.
We have so many stories. There was the time his wife (not Joan!) threw a floor pot at us from their second-floor condo. The time their “house boy” made a special birthday dinner for me and peeked around the door to watch Jim, our wives and me play nerf basketball in their house full of 100% custom furniture. Wrigley Field and camping in Florida and renting a house in Mexico to play golf and much, much more…and the stories I can’t tell you about here. We’ve had fun times.
Going into the game I did notice a couple of guys who had their own “need tickets” sign. They were seated at a table amongst the crowd. We stopped to talk to them for a bit. We learned they were graduates of Arizona and Arizona State. I wasn’t going to hold that against them. I am a former student of Arizona State myself.
When I started my business career, I thought it might be a good idea to get an MBA. I started out at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. I earned one three-hour credit in their master’s program. Next, I got promoted to Cincinnati and got another credit at Xavier University. Then I got promoted to Phoenix, Arizona, and got one more credit at Arizona State University.
At that point, I was promoted to Southern California and tried to enroll at the University of California-Irvine (Yes! The anteaters). I wanted to use the nine credits I had already accrued from the three previous schools. UCI said they couldn’t accept each of those credits. At that point, I decided that I would have to live by my wits and not live with an MBA degree. That seems to have worked out OK.
These two guys from Arizona were comfortably seated at a table with a sign that said, “I need two tickets”. This wasn’t the most aggressive way to get their point across in my opinion.
When I am using my need one or need two sign, I am constantly walking amongst everyone in the crowd. I want to get as much exposure to my request for tickets as possible. I don’t know if these guys ever got in the game or not. I’m thinking not.
I told you I was a fan of UCLA sports. Fan means fanatic. I want to be at the big games. I would not be satisfied simply watching the game on TV. There is so much ambiance…and expense to be enjoyed at the “big game”.
On the West Coast, UCLA, Gonzaga, and as much as I hate to say it, Arizona are the three top basketball programs by a long shot. Today we were playing Gonzaga.
UCLA fans do not “travel well”. What does “not traveling well” really mean? It simply means that UCLA people have so much going on in their lives that they are probably not going to take time to go to Las Vegas or New York City or anywhere else to follow the UCLA Bruins in large numbers. They might watch the game on TV. If they can’t do that, they’ll check their phone to see what the score was. Yes, there are all kinds of fans out there.
On the other hand, both Gonzaga and Arizona “travel really well”. Of course, their fans come from Spokane, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona. In those places, their college basketball program is just about the only game in town.
UCLA doesn’t have a great history with Gonzaga recently. Just two years ago we played Gonzaga in the NCAA Final Four game. They beat us with a half-court shot at the buzzer in overtime. I was in Indianapolis to see the game sitting right next to my son J.J.
Then just last year Carol and I traveled to Las Vegas to see UCLA play Gonzaga in a regular season game. This was a highly anticipated matchup. Ten minutes into the game we were down 30-10. It never got any better.
To add insult to injury two of our starters were out for this game with injuries. One of those guys was the Pac-12 defensive player of the year (above – Jaylen Clark). The other was the freshman of the year in the conference. We only play six guys. How could we possibly beat Gonzaga missing two of our top six players? I was concerned. I was worried. I was already thinking about flying overnight to Atlanta! I don’t want any of this to sound like an excuse. But without players, you are not going to win games like this.
The T-Mobile Arena is an excellent place to watch a basketball game even when it’s full of people. Our seats in row A, even for a price of $344 apiece, seemed like a real bargain. We had outstanding seats.
You should know that events like this do not feature just one game. We were going to see two games. The game before ours was Connecticut playing Arkansas. Connecticut won by 25 points so that was kind of a waste of time.
Between games, we had the chance to meet up with our son J.J. and his great-friend Dustin. Right at that time, someone noticed former UCLA coach Jim Harrick walking past. Harrick was the coach of the 1995 UCLA team that won the NCAA championship. I got a great picture of J.J. with Coach Harrick. Coach is going to be 85 years old this summer and looks great.
Concessions at events like this are expensive. A large can of beer was $18. A small bag of potato chips was $5.25. However, if you can’t afford to play with the big boys, then don’t show up at the game right?
Despite UCLA missing two of their best players we were somehow ahead by 13 points at halftime. I was shocked by that. I honestly thought we would lose by 20 points because of our injuries.
However, nothing good lasts forever, right? Somehow we lost a 13-point lead in the second half and were down by 10 points. That meant that Gonzaga had outscored us by 23 points in the space of about 10 minutes. Oh my. We didn’t make a single basket in those ten minutes despite having lots of makeable shots.
With just two minutes to go, we were down by nine points. With 12 SECONDS left, we had erased that deficit and had a one-point lead. Oh my, again. What a game!
Gonzaga called time out. When play resumed one of their players fired off a three-point shot with his foot on the mid-court logo. There was no way that shot from that far away could go in. That was the play they wanted to run after a time-out with seven seconds left in the game?
The shot went in! Gonzaga beat us. Carol would not be coming to the game on Saturday. I would now be flying overnight to Atlanta and trackchasing in the southeast for the weekend. Things change. No, my plans don’t always go the way I want them to go.
I might comment on the fans at these big games. I wanted to sit in row A of our section so I didn’t have to look over any heads to see the game. That part of the plan worked out well.
Somehow I always get seated in front of someone, usually a fan from another team. This guy wants to broadcast the entire game as if he were the team’s radio announcer. If I don’t get that guy I get the person who complains about every officiating call that is made. Of course, tonight was no different.
We sat in front of an Arkansas fan who bellowed out after every call. He felt his team didn’t travel or didn’t charge or didn’t commit a single mistake. At the same time, he thought Connecticut committed a flagrant foul on every play. The only good thing is that Arkansas was being beaten so badly that after a while, the guy shut up. Thank goodness.
I am a fan. I have this question for other fans. What kind of fan could think that every one of 30-40 officiating calls goes against their team in a single game? Has a game ever been played where an official made a bad call 40 times against your team and none for the other team? What is the matter with these people?
Now it was time for my college buddy and me to say goodbye. I do believe that Jim felt that I lead an “unconventional” lifestyle when I explained I was now going to try to fly on a red-eye flight to Atlanta. He was going home to sleep in his bed. I was going to the airport in the hopes of flying five hours overnight on a standby basis. If I didn’t make the 12:30 a.m. flight I would try for a 6:30 a.m. flight and then an 8:30 a.m. flight. If I didn’t make any of those I would drive nearly 300 miles back home. Unconventional? Very likely.
I made it back to my parking garage. I was bummed about losing the way we did. I sat in the interior of my Tesla with my laptop. The cellular connection was bad as you might expect in a high-rise parking garage. I bought an airplane ticket from Las Vegas to Atlanta.
Then something happened that would change the entire plan just like that Gonzaga three-pointer changed the entire plan. I had thought that it might be a good idea to check out the racing event that I was planning to see in Georgia. They were going to race a two-day program on Friday and Saturday. Small track racing events can be “fragile”. At times it doesn’t take much to create a cancellation.
I went online to check the track’s Facebook page. To my surprise, the event had been canceled just hours before. Rain was coming into Georgia on Saturday and rather than race on Friday and get rained out on Saturday the track would cancel the entire program and reschedule for August.
If I hadn’t thought to check the racetrack’s Facebook page at the very last minute I would have flown overnight for five hours from Las Vegas to Atlanta. I might have rented my car and driven to Northern Georgia and found an empty racetrack. I don’t mind saying that was a good call on my part.
Now it was approaching 10 p.m. in Las Vegas. I didn’t have a hotel. I didn’t have a basketball game to see on Saturday. and I didn’t have a reason to fly back to the southeast to trackchase.
What would YOU do in this situation? I decided I would simply begin driving for the next five hours back to our home in San Clemente. I would need to stop to charge my car’s batteries along the way making my arrival back home at 3 a.m. or later. At this point, I don’t think I have to do anything to convince you that my lifestyle is truly unconventional. I was about ready to head off into the land of more unconventionality.
When you’re a fan and your team loses the big game, you don’t feel very good about things. At the California/Nevada border, I stopped to charge my car. I walked into a convenience store to grab a snack. If you’re not feeling positive about things and you see a huge endcap display selling donuts don’t you just want to eat every one of those donuts? I settled for just two. They were delicious.
My 2020 Tesla Model X is an SUV. The rear seats fold down. This creates a very nice sleeping opportunity even for someone of my size at a height of 6’3” tall.
I had brought some bedding on this trip just in case things didn’t work out. Things didn’t work out? I didn’t bring the bedding for the possibility that the basketball game wouldn’t work out. I brought the bedding in case my trackchasing flight plan didn’t work out.
The ticket I bought from Las Vegas to Atlanta was on a standby basis, leaving at 12:30 a.m. If I didn’t make that flight the next flight would be at 6:30 a.m. I figured I might be able to go back to my car between 12:30 a.m. and 6:30 a.m. and grab three or four hours of sleep in the parking lot of the Las Vegas airport. Ya, you gotta think ahead when you do what I do.
As I drove along back toward California from Las Vegas I began to think. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to stop at one of the charging spots and catch a few hours of sleep “in the back”. I have slept in my Tesla a few times on racing trips to Arizona.
Tonight’s temperature was going to get down into the high 30s in the California desert. One of the cool things about Tesla, amongst many very cool things, is their “camp mode”.
With camp mode, I can set the car’s interior temperature to anything I want and sleep in comfort. I think if I lived in a hurricane-dominated locale where folks lose electricity for days, I would want to have an electric car. Every morning, until the hurricane came and the electricity went out, the car would be fully charged. I could sleep comfortably overnight in air-conditioned comfort until the juice came back on in the house!
From about midnight until 7 a.m. I slept in the back of the “Tesla Marriott”. I had stopped in Yermo, California at a place called “EddieWorld”. If you’re ever driving from Southern California to Las Vegas or vice versa stopping at EddieWorld is great. They have plenty of superchargers. Heck, they have plenty of gas-fuel pumps. The interior of EddieWorld is huge with all kinds of convenience store offerings as well as a restaurant.
When I was about ready to depart EddieWorld on Friday morning, a guy came up riding a nice Harley Davidson motorcycle. He got my attention and asked the following.
He told me he was just $14 short of being able to pay for the Motel 6 in Barstow, California which was just down the road. He wanted to know if I could help him out. Could I help him? Did I want to help him?
Before you jump to any conclusions just know that this fellow didn’t look like a “bum” holding a cardboard sign asking for money. He was driving a bike worth $10,000 or more. He looked like me and he talked like me. Was this a scam? I couldn’t tell you for sure.
I will say this. If I was $14 short of being able to afford a Motel 6 and I needed to use a Motel 6 and I asked you to help me out I would hope that you would. I pride myself on being able to judge people after a brief meeting. I think I learned this skill by interviewing sales candidates way back in the day.
I gave the guy a twenty-dollar bill. He thanked me and immediately rode his bike out of the area…presumably the Motel 6 in Barstow, California. I believe in karma. I believe if you do the right thing it comes back to you.
Carol says, and I believe her point of view entirely, that when you give something it comes back even greater to you later on. What do you think about that?
I shared this story on my Facebook page. It got more likes than just about anything I’ve ever shared on Facebook. There were a couple of skeptics.
You would never see me stopping my car and giving cash to a person with a cardboard sign asking for money at an intersection. On the other hand, in a situation like the above, I am more than willing to do it. I guess in the short time we talked, I became convinced that the guy’s story was likely real. Was it real? I will never know. However, the people who are in charge of karma will know what I did and if karma is a thing “what goes around comes around”.
Was I going to get an immediate Karma reward? Not exactly. Just a few miles down the road a rock was kicked up and put a good-sized nick in my windshield. How’s that for karma?
My Tesla Model X has the largest windshield of any car made in the world. The windshield covers 31 square feet! It’s so big it’s very difficult to get a good photo. The windshield runs from the hood over my head. It provides the best view by a factor of hundreds of any car that I have ever driven. The windshield is also known to cost nearly $2,000 to replace.
Luckily I have “glass insurance” with Farmers. A company called Safelite will come out and try to return my windshield to “new condition”. For that, I won’t pay anything.
If that repair doesn’t meet my satisfaction, I can use the second part of my glass insurance. For a $100 deductible, I will get an entirely new windshield. We’ll see how that goes.
On the final part of my trip back to San Clemente, I needed to stop at a supercharger for about 20 minutes. The supercharger was located next to an Asian strip mall that offered up all kinds of Asian restaurants and a huge supermarket.
I love touring supermarkets. Most of the brands carried a foreign language on the packaging. I couldn’t tell if it was Chinese or Vietnamese or what. I should have used my Google app to read those signs but I forgot I had that capability.
It was lunchtime. I had to get things done in 20 minutes before my car was fully charged. With Tesla when you’re at a supercharger you have five minutes to move your car when it becomes fully charged. After that, there can be a one-dollar-per-minute penalty. I like that. It keeps people from hogging the supercharger.
Inside the grocery store, I saw a restaurant selling dumplings a.k.a. dim sum. A dozen dumplings were being sold for $12.95. I figured I would buy an order and what I didn’t eat I could take home.
When I went to pay with my Visa credit card I was informed there was a $0.50 charge for orders less than $15. I hate paying surcharges with a credit card purchase. I told the lady to give me two dozen dumplings! Now I was walking out of the grocery store with a $27 bill for two dozen dumplings. The dumplings weren’t as large as I expected. They were overpriced. I walked out of the store, thinking I just made a dumb move. I was pretty certain of that. Then I sat in the car and consumed nearly a dozen of those little things.
I said at the beginning of this message that I take a lot of trips. I love every one of those trips but once in a long while a trip doesn’t go exactly as I planned.
The big negative on this trip was UCLA losing their basketball game. Nevertheless, the Bruins have given us so much entertainment this year. It wasn’t much fun holding up the line in the parking garage when my QR code wouldn’t scan. It wasn’t much fun to learn that the racing in Georgia had been canceled on the forecast for the next day. I didn’t like that. I didn’t care for the crack in my windshield. I didn’t like that I overpaid for my dim sum.
I am a very positive thinker. Except for UCLA losing the basketball game the things I mentioned above didn’t bother me in the least. No big deal. All part of the adventure.
The real advantage of this particular trip was being a fan. Being able to see the game with J.J., Dustin, and Jim and come so close to getting a win when we were dramatic underdogs made for a night full of drama.
I didn’t mind paying $344 for a ticket to a basketball game. I didn’t mind because this wasn’t just a “basketball game”. What was it? It was all of the things that I mentioned above. It was a trip! It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.
After reading my tale what is your take? Is my lifestyle exciting? Is it unusual? Is it unconventional? Maybe a little bit of all three?
I know I promised you in my last message that my next message was going to be all about projecting income and expenses to support an early and financially secure retirement. You’ll get that next week. I’ll have some time on my hands. I won’t be going to Houston.
Thanks for reading along. I appreciate you doing that.
Randy Lewis – Just plain unconventional