The River

It all started with the mall behind the hotel. It was a lovely open-air mall.  Never seen anything quite like it. Anyway, it had a food court (i.e. LUNCH!).

The song is completely wrong--it does rain in southern California. And sometimes it rains a lot. Note how well we comply with yellow tape.

My humor picture for the trip.  My, how Californians like to declare the obvious.  That's a road, by the way.

Guess we should've gone behind the convention center instead of around the front.  We had to balance-beam around the water.  It was all very amusing.

As we approached the bridge over the river, we discovered a crowd of hungry astronomers, a lot more water, and one extremely overloaded golf cart.

Turns out the river was higher than we thought.  It was blocking our route to food!  Note how we're still ignoring the yellow tape.  Well, there were really only three options:  wade (like Ryan),

hitch a ride (on Ryan),

or take the "shuttle" (i.e. a golf cart driven by one of the hotel staff).

Well, that was entertaining.  Until we found out that the little bit of water before the bridge was nothing compared to the water after the bridge.  The flooded parking garage was not surprising considering it had been flooded the entire time we were there.

However, the roads past the mall and halfway up to the mall being flooded...now that surprised us.

We came back from lunch and discovered that the water had risen still further.

So since the shuttle was out, we had to either wade or get a ride.  Some astronomers just decided to forego the nice clothes for the time being and wander through the water.

Ryan carries some stuff while Chris carries Monica across.

Next:  The Beach