"Come out to the coast..."

"Come out to the coast, we'll have a few laughs!"
Bruce Willis, as detective John McClain, in the movie Die Hard

"Come out to California, we'll get up to no good!"
Beth Bryan, in an in email offering me unlimited use of her spare bedroom in Palm Springs.

When she first made that offer I was stoned on morphine fresh from surgery, wearing a cervical collar, lying in a bed in Intensive Care in a hospital in Montreal.  She repeated the offer several times, and so today I leave for a month in California. I'll be using her apartment as a base of operations, making bike trips of varying distance and duration all over the state. She's going to be pretty busy with work for most of the month, but we've planned a couple of weekend excursions that should prove to be entertaining. Beth has a friend of hers who is a bail bondsman on call, so I'm sure everything will turn out just fine. She has emailed me a detailed set of directions including the best places to stop and buy gas before I cross the border from Arizona, and I have stockpiled 2 bottles of Grey Goose, 2 bottles of Ciroc berry flavored, and a bottle of Chopin, as the liquor taxes are much lower in Arizona. She has even gone so far as to give up her garage to allow me a secure place to put the bike. The bike is very tightly tied down on the trailer, all my crap is loaded in the car, except for the crap I have abandoned in my wake or pawned off on someone else, the laundry is done, and the only thing left to do is to slam the door as loudly as I can when I depart the house before dropping the keys off to Margaret.