Notes from Away: Seeing the beach from six stories up

When we last left off in the little running tale of my trip to California with my son, things had gone all kinds of wrong on the trip out, but we had made it in one piece; salvaged the scuttled first day with one good meal; and gone to bed fed.

That entry was easy to write. The events had a natural flow. They fit neatly into a little story. I needed do n…