THE MENTAL RENTAL

By Suzanne Sparrow Watson

The view – its only redeeming feature

Here I am again…I hope you enjoyed Bob’s travel logs as much as I did.  While he was enjoying the midnight sun in Iceland and playing the Old Course in Scotland, I had planned to spend a month in Nipomo, a small community on the Central Coast of California where we have spent time over the past seven summers.  We have always rented through VRBO and have had wonderful relationships with the homeowners.  It was a good deal – they provide us with a nice house and we treat it as if it were our own.  A win-win for everyone.  But the Wall Street Journal ran an article this past winter cautioning against renting directly with homeowners.  They cited all manner of problems, from “phantom” houses where people would arrive at the given address to find no house at all, to owners who weren’t responsive to plumbing emergencies or insect infestations.  Instead, they advised, go through one of the professional rental agencies where you were assured 24/7 care and responsiveness.  So, since the house we normally rent had been sold, we rented a three bedroom condominium at Blacklake Golf Course through TurnKey Vacation Rentals.  We rented the unit for the month of July and eagerly anticipated getting the heck out of the Arizona heat and over to some cool, coastal fog.

                  Cups from 1985

We have been to Nipomo so many times that we had seen the outside of these condominiums countless times.  Our unit was adjacent to the fairway of the ninth hole and has a beautiful, expansive view overlooking much of the golf course.  Unfortunately, that is it’s only virtue.  As we entered the unit it all looked okay – dated, but comfortable.  Kind of like me.  It was only as we began to settle in the following day that we noticed how grungy the place really was.  Clearly the unit had been “glamour shot” on the TurnKey website.  The coffee pot was grungy and the coffee cups weren’t any better, as you can see from the photo.  The pots and pans were filthy and scratched, the potato peeler didn’t peel, and worst of all, the “pry open” wine opener had pried one too many bottles.  It took both of us 10 minutes to open a bottle.  I was getting so desperate I considred cracking the neck on the edge of the table and guzzling wine straight from the bottle.

     The sink that died 20 years ago

As bad as all that was, the sink was straight out of a horror movie.  In all of my rental apartments, as a starving student or poor working girl who could only afford bologna sandwiches on white bread for dinner, I have never had a sink this disgusting.  I tried to recall when we last had a tetanus shot.  So…what to do?  We decided to suck it up.  We drove to the local Ace Hardware to buy a coffee maker, pots, pans and coffee cups.  As for the sink, I scrubbed it within an inch of it’s life.  But cleaning it was futile…its life had been snuffed out long ago.  We made do and ate out.  A lot.  Four days after arrival the Wi-Fi broke down.  A representative from TurnKey came to fix it later that day and acknowledged that the unit was a bit “dated” and had the good grace to look embarrassed.  She said someone from TurnKey corporate offices would be in touch with us on Monday to discuss compensation to make up for the condition of the unit.

Of course, Monday came and went with no phone call.  On Tuesday I went to the mailbox as I was expecting a package and found a letter addressed to “Occupant” from the City of Nipomo.  The letter was pink.  I don’t know much about utility company billing but I’m pretty sure that pink is not a color you want to see.  I opened it, hoping that the city was simply notifying us of upcoming road work or utility repairs.  Nope.  The owner was delinquent in her payments so they were going to shut the water off within the next week if they didn’t receive their money.  So, again, I called TurnKey.  They were shocked, SHOCKED!, to learn of this.  It was going to be taken up with management and someone would get back to me.  Long story short, I finally heard from someone who said they would refund us $100 for our troubles and “not to worry” about the water bill.  Sure…these owners hadn’t replaced a coffee cup in 35 years but I was supposed to sleep soundly knowing they would pay their delinquent water bill.  Two days later I called again, raised hell, and they offered us another $300.

They specialized in LOUD

So now we had $400 to offset our “inconveniences”.  But we weren’t done yet. Every Wednesday evening they have band concerts on the lawn outside our condo.  Not real bands.  More like garage bands comprised of Baby Boomers who, “back in the day”, dreamed of becoming the next Beatles.  Now, they are just off-tune and loud.  But “loud” was redefined the following Saturday night when a wedding reception took place outside our window.  It featured a live mariachi band and a DJ who played heavy metal.  The windows (which of course were vintage 1985) had all the soundproofing capabilities of Saran Wrap.  For FIVE  hours the windows shook and the music blared.  Surely this is how we torture ISIS prisoners.  Needless to say, we were miserable.  We tried to put the best spin on it but our normally pleasing personalities were getting a bit testy.  Finally we realized that it was better to forfeit two weeks of rent and go home than to stay and be unhappy.  That is when, after 30 years of marriage, you know you’ve married the right person.  So we packed up and got out of there.   I called TurnKey to let them know we were leaving early.  The person had no knowledge of our previous calls.  Over the course of two weeks I spoke with seven different TurnKey “customer experience” people and – at their request – sent them photos of the unit.  Most never bothered to look at the email exchanges or the pictures of the unit.  To say the right hand didn’t know what the left was doing was an understatement.  The best example is when a manager called – at last, someone with some decision-making responsibility! – only to have him tell me he was from Florida and was calling about the water problem in the master bedroom.  Nope.  Not even close.

We ended up spending the remainder of the month in Scottsdale, where the weather was blessedly under 100 degrees.  Of course, the monsoons arrived which made my hair frizz and my thighs stick together.  But it was still better than looking at that sink.

How Long Can We Do This?

by Bob Sparrow

masthead_4_copy.png   While Suzanne was enjoying the cooler environs of Nipomo and I was trying to sneak into Russia, this past August marked a small blog milestone – our 4-year anniversary. Those of you who have been with us for the entire ride may remember that our blog started in August 2011 – we certainly don’t remember back that far! Initially it was a way to use social media to drive visitors to our ill-fated tribute poem writing business, Red Posey. The blog was then entitled Morning News in Verse and we would follow a USA Today newspaper format by writing four rhyming stanzas about topical news – one stanza each about Headlines, Business, Sports and Entertainment. Suzanne and I would alternate publishing a poem EVERYDAY!   That everyday thing lasted for about two months, when we realized that it was occupying way too much of our life – like all of it; so we cut back to twice a week. Every once in a while we would deviate from the poetic format, as deviates are wont to do, and write prose about various subjects. An example of this occurred in September of 2011, the 10th anniversary of 9/11, when Suzanne wrote a moving piece entitled, Small Moments – A 9/11 Tribute, World Trade Center 9/11/01which received a large number of hits and many great comments – it is still to this day, probably the most visited blog in our archives. We eventually noticed that our number of blog hits and comments would increase when we scrapped the iambic pentameter and just wrote prose, not like pros, but prose nonetheless. While we immediately noticed the increase in interest when we scraped the poetry format, it took us until March of the next year to officially change our content and format to what it is currently. And since we weren’t rhyming any more we changed our name – not to Morning News Without Verse, but to ‘From A Bird’s Eye View’, a name borrowed from a newspaper column our mother wrote for the Novato Advance back when our dad was owner, editor and publisher of that paper in the 1940 and 50s.

We continued to post a blog twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, until July 2012. Then, either sensing that we were running out of ideas or audience, or both, we switched to our current schedule of every Monday morning. Whether the deadline was everyday, twice a week or once a week, I am happy to report that we have not missed a scheduled posting since starting this back in August 2011; I guess that’s due in part to our father’s newspaper blood coursing through our veins, where missing a deadline just isn’t an option.

Novato Advance

Dad & Mom in front of the Novato Advance

Over these past four years we have published over 300 blogs, which have generated over 25,000 ‘views’ and nearly 1,000 comments (A special thank you to those who comment and let us know that our words don’t just fly off into cyber space). Our biggest day came last December when 388 people clicked on Suzanne’s ‘A TRIBUTE TO MY FIRST BEST FRIEND’ about her friend Leslie Sherman.  And if you Google ‘From a Bird’s Eye View blog’, you will find about 530 results over 12 pages – we are fortunate enough to be found . . . on the first page!!!

I’ve been lucky enough to visit a lot of remarkable places and meet a number of interesting people; and I am thankful for staying awake in English class long enough to understand how to put a sentence together without dangling a modifier . . . most of the time. But the best part of all this is working with my sister, Suzanne. While our styles are a bit different, we enjoy reading and editing each other’s posts prior to publishing (OK, she edits mine a whole lot more than I edit hers!), discussing subject matter, travel schedules and just plain catching up with each other on a much more regular basis than before we started writing together.

So as we try to avoid breaking our arms from patting ourselves on the back, we’d mostly like to thank you loyal ‘bird watchers’ for tuning in. As you know, we have written about everything from the ridiculous to the sublime (mostly me the ridiculous and Suzanne the sublime), so thank you for tolerating the expression of our thoughts, opinions and experiences.

How long can we do this? As long as you keep reading, we’ll keep writing.

Suz-Bob

Thank you!!

 

The 2nd Annual ‘Cheater’s Cup’

by Bob Sparrow

                                                     The Cheater Cup slogan:  ‘A family that competes together, cheats together”

cheaters cup

The ‘Cheater’s Cup’ named in honor of Lance Armstrong

     Actually, it’s the first known Cheater’s Cup event, because of a little detail during the first one – like no one even knew there was a contest going on! For those who have followed us here for the last few years, you may remember a story written by Suzanne last July entitled, JOCKO’S AND THE GREAT CHEAT-OFF (link: https://fromabirdseyeview.com/?p=2002). During last year’s Nipomo family gathering, our brother Jack and his wife Sharon, Suzanne and Al and Linda and I decided to play golf at the funky, 12-hole executive course called Monarch Dunes. It was just for fun and no one really kept score, or so we thought, but after the round, while having an adult beverage at the 19th hole, or I guess on this course it was the 13th hole, Suzanne, the self-appointed score keeper, pulls out a score card and announces that the women had won the match. “What match?” the men shouted incredulously and demanded to see the card. As suspected it was filled with cross outs, eraser marks and one hole that had been eliminated all together. Thus the ‘Cheater’s Cup’ was born. To add status to this year’s event, we’ve adopted Barry Bonds, who hit a lot of ‘fake home runs’, as our Cheater Cup spokesperson, and have named the trophy going to the annual winners, the Lance Armstrong Cheater’s Cup, so that we never forget the contributions to cheating made by this cycling dope . . . er.  I think both famous cheaters would be proud to be part of our short, albeit nefarious history.

BBonds

Fake homerun hitter, Barry Bonds

This year’s event was held on a ‘real’ golf course, Santa Maria Country Club, Jack and Sharon’s home course, although Sharon, who had spent the last three weeks in France, was ‘trapped’ in Paris due to a pilot’s strike; we think she’ll be home for Christmas.  In true cheater style, the ladies tried to have Natalie Gulbis fill in for her – the men were conflicted, but finally didn’t allow it.

It was no surprise that everyone kept score this year and it was also no surprise that none of the scorecards matched at the end of the round. The round was played as a ‘best ball’ between the ladies and the guys, but because the ladies had one less player, the guys agreed that they would eliminate their best ball on each hole and take the best ball from the other two. It seem fair to the ladies . . . at first, but as the match started to slip away from them, they lodged a complaint and played the rest of the round ‘under protest’.

blower

Blowing a putt has a whole different definition with us

I could elaborate on some of the creative golf cheating techniques that were used during the match, like Suzanne’s clandestine foot mashie to improve her lie, or Linda’s way of improving her lie by always carrying a pack of green Life Savers with her and casually placing one under her ball when no one was looking. Brother-in-law, Al would always turn heads when we finished each hole as he uttered his standard phrase, “Give me a par”. Brother Jack wore the pants with a hole in the pocket, just big enough for a golf ball to fit through, so that when we’re looking for his lost ball in the rough, he would surreptitiously slide his hand, with a new ball in it, into his pocket and push it through the hole; it would slide down his pant leg and land in a place that miraculously had an open shot to the green, and shout, “I found it!” With my long putter, I would regularly take ‘gimme’ putts that were ‘inside the leather’, of course the leather on a long putter assured me that I never had to putt anything that was within 6 feet.

JSA

Jack, Suzanne & Al

As I said, I could elaborate on these cheating techniques, but the match, the day, the weekend was really all about getting together and having some fun with a great family – and that we did. We all feel very lucky to not only call each other family, but also call each other friends, even though on the golf course we might call each other things that would suggest otherwise.

 

“You’re such a cheater; the best wood in your bag is a pencil”

JOCKO’S AND THE GREAT CHEAT-OFF

by Suzanne Sparrow Watson 
Normally we are healthy eaters, if one can overlook the occasional foray to   Dairy Queen and In 'n Out. In fact, I'm pretty sure that I'm the only reason  the local kale farmer is in the black this year. Butwhen we are in Nipomo, as we are now, we throw caution and our cholesterol to the wind and eat at       Jocko's. Jocko's has put Nipomo on the map. Okay, that might be a slight      exaggeration since most people still don't know where Nipomo is. Nevertheless,it is likely that for those who do know where it is it's because they've been to Jocko's. Jocko's inside

As you can see from the picture Jocko’s has all the atmosphere of a cattle barn. I think the last remodel was done sometime in the 50’s. The 1850’s. But people come from far and wide to eat here so they must be doing something right. That something is their beef. It is grilled over an oak BBQ, with just the right amount of charring on the outside and tenderness on this inside. We went there last week with my brother, Jack, and his wife Sharon. It was a Tuesday night and we had a reservation for 6:30. We were not seated until almost 7. For those who didn’t have a reservation the wait is closer to an hour and a half. Let’s just say that the bar business at Jocko’s is quite brisk.

It’s the type of place thatJocko's bar serves drinks in those old-fashioned jelly jar glasses but that’s just what you’d expect at joint that has paper place mats. The wait staff is cheerful, which is astounding given that they serve over 300 dinners a night – every night. The menu has a wide array of beef dishes but their chicken is also out of this world. The steak sandwich is HUGE and comes with a salad, antipasto dish, beans, potato, and then, as if your veins aren’t already coursing with enough fat, vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce.

The price of all this? $17.00. Or, to put it in perspective, $1 less than Bob paid for two beers at Del Mar. JSB NIPOMO

Speaking of Bob, we just had our annual family golf tournament here in Nipomo.
There was a lot of pre-tournament revelry, as you can see from the picture of us three.

I think Bob had just said something about winning the golf tournament. Or some such foolishness. In any event, there was much revelry on Friday night. By Saturday morning there was some talk of needing resuscitation but the group rallied in time to take a stroll through the quaint town of Arroyo Grande. As it turns out, there was a vintage car show on the Main Street and we had a ball walking around looking at all the old cherry cars. Until we realized that we had either owned or ridden in most of them. It is a sad day indeed when you realize that you are “vintage”. Jack decided to sit in front of a local winery with our dog,Dash, and just watch the world go by.

20130728-172158.jpgHe always was the smart one.

In any event, our golf tournament later that day was a bit of a bust. We played the 12 hole Challenge Course at Monarch Dunes. Some of us were more challenged than others. It is a prickly little track with greens that defy the normal logic of putting. To make matters worse, I was in charge of scoring but I completely forgot to record one of the holes. Which on a 12 hole course is pretty pathetic. And tells you everything you need to know about my short term memory these days. But since I was in charge and had the scorecard I just declared that the girls won the tournament and the guys were no wiser. Until they read this.

But never let it be said that a little cheating at golf got in the way of a good time with our family. We all know that we are so lucky to be related…and better yet, good friends.

NIPOMO – FOREIGN OR DOMESTIC?

Capt_Dana_Tree_Nipomo

Captain Dana Tree
Hopefully he didn’t hang people from it

By Suzanne Sparrow Watson

This week we’re doing the best thing you can do in Scottsdale in the summer.  Leave.  I can hardly contain my excitement.  If it weren’t so darn hot I’d do a dance, but blinking my eyes while lying in a heap on the couch will have to suffice.  For several summers now we have spent a few weeks in Nipomo.  If you’re typical of my friends you have just asked yourself – where in the heck is Nipomo?  I’ve had people guess that it’s some quaint village on the coast of Italy.  One person thought we were going to a remote city in Japan.  I have even discovered that if you write it in a blog, spell-checker doesn’t recognize “Nipomo”. Fact is, most people have no idea where it is and that’s what makes it so good.

Nipomo is a quaint coastal village and it is remote (sort of) set between Santa Maria and San Luis Obispo in the Central Coast of California.  We discovered it several years ago as we were driving on Highway 101 from San Francisco to Los Angeles.  There was a Trilogy development that had just opened in Nipomo that we wanted to check out.  For those of you unfamiliar, Trilogy is the name Shea Homes has given to all the “active adult” communities they’re building. Guess it sounds better than “old geezer housing”.   Being active and adult (okay, not always but at least sometimes) we wanted to see if it might be a place to live one day.

We told the sales person we had never heard of Nipomo and he said that it was once the answer to the “Jeopardy” question: “Where is the most consistent weather in the United States?”   Given that NO ONE I know in California has ever heard of Nipomo, much less contestants who might be on Jeopardy, I suspect that it was just one of the many lies that the salesman told that day.  But we were intrigued enough with the surroundings to come back the next summer and stay in the Blacklake Golf community and have done so most summers ever since.

Turns out that Nipomo was first settled by the Chumash Indians.  Ne-po-mah is the Chumash term for “foot of the hill”.  It probably should have been “footing the bill” given the success of their current day casino.  Rancho Nipomo was one of the first and largest of the Mexican land grants in San Luis Obispo County.  Modern day Nipomo was founded in 1837 when the Mexican governor granted William Dana, a Boston sea-captain, 38,000 acres in the area.  He married a woman from Santa Barbara and in 1839 they built the Dana Adobe, which served as an important stop for travelers between Mission San Luis Obispo and Mission Santa Barbara.  It also became the exchange point for mail going between Northern and Southern California, thus becoming the first regular mail route in California.  I wonder if they lost as much mail back then?  But I digress.

Migrant Mother

Migrant Mother

Nipomo became a large farming area and was a major stop for the Pacific Coast Railway from the 1880’s through the 1930’s.  Turns out that one of my favorite photographs (right)was taken in Nipomo:  “Migrant Mother” by Dorothea Lange .  Apparently during the Depression Ms. Lange worked for the Resettlement Administration and would travel the old US Highway 101 photographing migrant farm workers.  The name of the woman in the picture is Florence Owens Thompson.  In the 1950’s the current Highway 101 was built west of the old road.  Fittingly, the old highway was re-named Thompson Road.

Blacklake

Blacklake Golf Course
Odds are I’ll be in that trap

By the end of 1942, the train tracks had been removed for the war effort and Nipomo became just another small farming community.  Today, it is known for two things:  golf and Jocko’s steak house.  The golf is good, with 27 holes at Blacklake, 30 holes at Trilogy (including a fabulous 12 hole 3-par course) and a beautiful course in Arroyo Grande, just a mile from Nipomo.  Notice I said it was good – not great.  The Nipomo Chamber of Commerce describes the golf this way: “The prevalence of golf has led some to refer to Nipomo as a mini Pebble Beach, only with better weather.”  I think the “some” they’re referring to are a) members of said chamber and b) people who have never actually been to Pebble Beach.  But then again, in Nipomo you don’t pay $500 (plus cart and caddie) per round.  Nor do the golf courses in Nipomo require that you stay at their lovely Lodge for two nights at $700 per night in order to play there.    So all in all, it’s a good experience and you don’t have to take out a second mortgage to hit a little white ball.

Jocko’s Steak House is famous up and down the coast of California.  Even on a Tuesday night the line to get in wraps around the corner.  It’s so good that, well, I’ll just say this:  I don’t eat red meat and I make an exception once a year to eat at Jocko’s.  In fact, it is SO good that I will devote my next blog entirely to Jocko’s – assuming that I haven’t gone into cardiac arrest before I can write my review.