Sometimes it’s good to get an excuse to get out of the office. When that excuse leads to going to hang out at the beach for a couple hours, well, even better. That fortuitous series of events led me to loading up Bessie and heading to El Porto for FuelTV‘s Beach Day.
It began with a Facebook message to Ice Cream Man saying we should stop by. I thought, since PacSun is our main sponsor and they’re a big advertiser on FuelTV it was a perfect thing to do. Frank was around to bring a camera along so we took off to document the experience.
Not knowing the area very well or what to expect parking-wise, we weren’t expecting the parking lot to be jammed full. And having Bessie slowly moving through the parking lot had us a target of teenager mobs. We found the FuelTV tents, but they were in the middle of the beach, not prime for getting ice cream from the truck. This, along with the sudden onslaught we were unprepared for led us to park the truck a couple blocks away and trek the cooler down to the beach (plus there was no parking at the beach).
As soon as we showed up with the cooler, people were intrigued, and once we shouted out “free ice cream” they were ecstatic. They had a pretty big crew of FuelTV employees there and were incredibly thankful to Ice Cream Man and PacSun for bringing them some treats. We ended up hanging around for about an hour to make sure everybody in the vicinity was sated with ice cream, then made the arduous journey back up the hill. Man, there’s nothing like carrying a practically empty cooler up a hill to make you feel out of shape.
As we went to make our trip back home, I got turned around and missed the freeway. Figuring it was getting close to rush hour I decided it best to just take PCH home anyway. This proved to be prescient since as soon as we got into Redondo Beach the throttle cable on Bessie snapped. Fortunately, Frank had a smartphone and we were able to find a hardware store a few blocks away and got in about five minutes before closing time to get the tools to make a quick fix. It worked well enough to get us home, but I had to postpone some planned PacSun store stops the next day as I had to take her in to the mechanic the next morning for a more permanent fix (after it snapped again in the morning). Hopefully we’ll be back up and running soon.
