It Was A Day At The Beach

Here's the street entrance to the Torrey Pines Gliderport. Note all the "new" construction going on across the street at UCSD. Two year gone by, and they are still building "new" things there. Must be an architectual school:


Here's the glider port itself:


OK, here's what we've been led to believe is the beginning of the trail down. Nice view:


And here's the view at the edge of a ledge looking down...that a loooong way down:


We stop to admire a pretty glider in the distance before we attempt the decent:


The pretty glider sails by. Are we procratinating on going down this thing? YES:


OK we begin to climb down. The trail has lots of loose dirt, making every step a potential slip. We know this, because we start slipping immediately. We quickly figure out the solution, however, which is to take smaller steps. Smaller steps, less forward momentum, less slipping. Simple really.

We look down an edge. Yeeee! Slip down that side (or, if someone found a suspicious key fob on me, and I was pushed off), I'd bounce a few times on some protruding rocks on the way down, and probably be dead before my body reached the beach below:


A look back up after going a ways down. Another tricky thing about this so-called "trail" is that it actually branches out at several points, forcing you to choose which way to go. They all get down there eventually it looks like, but as it turns out, some branches are much safer than the others. And it's not immediately obvious which one they are:


We do manage to quickly figure out, however, if someone took the trouble of carving steps into a branch, thats probably for a reason and hence the one to take:


The Crab Catcher lies over yonder, on the edge of that promontory:


Some knowledgable regular in a green shirt passed us, and we used him as an unwitting Sherpa guide to lead us down the correct path to the bottom:


We did it! We made it down alive! What's this sign say? Oh, NOW you tell us!:


Blacks Beach. Warm. Sunny. Beautiful. Pratically inaccessable and nearly totally deserted:


You know, for some reason Elm and other always claimed "Oh, Harlow and Joe knew they were being recorded."

First of all, it's a ridiculous claim on it's face. Had they really known, they would NOT have incriminated themselves so badly on those tapes. Duh.

Now, Harlow and Joe may have had suspicions. Not KNOWLEDGE, suspicions. Huge difference. In fact, we don't need to get this from Elm...we KNOW they had suspicions! They said as much the day before at the Crab Catcher, when they refused to discuss the murder until they were standing on this very beach the next day.

And I don't know whose idea it was to take Harlow and Joe to this particular beach, to calm those suspicions, but I have to say it was a BRILLIANT idea. I mean, you stand here on this beach, facing north...in front of you and in back are football fields of sand, occupied by maybe a few isolated beachgoers, seabirds, and the occasional hang glider overhead. To your left is 1000s of miles of ocean and Somali pirates, and to your right a sheer cliff wall soaring into the air. A steady breeze off the ocean makes surveillance by parabolic microphone an impossibility at any range. So, your conversations can go on, without even the remotest chance of evedropping.

Hence the need for a recorder in the key fob. Even still, I'm amazed the audio apparantly came out as good as it did, with the constant breeze interfering with the sound pickup.

But it's not just the raw physical accoustics of the place...it has a sense of isolation that creates the perfect mood to set aside suspicions...and encourage candid and revealing conversation. You have to be standing on this beach to fully appreciate this fact. This was an ingenious place to bring Harlow and Joe, and get Harlow to confess.

Well, what else can I say? We brought a small football with us, and tossed it around like girly men. And my friend carried me slung across his shoulder naked in to the surf. 'Tis a pity we didn't have a third person there to take pictures of us! :-)

One last thing...we scanned the beach, trying to see if we could spot Chris Henriquez (aka DJ Christian Alexander) publically deflowering any new 16 year olds, but no such luck:


Then, a sinking feeling passed over us: We realized we have to not climb up! Ugh. Well, I will say this, climbing up is much safer than down; less slippage because your leg is pulling you up rather than pushing you down. And it was good exercise, I suppose.

But now, we are pretty spent for the day. Things we planned for today, I think we'll put off until tomorrow...