Open road

Very successful first day of my road trip! I drove up to Rancho Palos Verdes to meet a USC professor whose work on Job has inspired me for many years, then across Los Angeles to LACMA for the Caravaggio exhibit, then along the cosmopolitan Wilshire Boulevard to downtown LA to meet an ex-student I haven't seen in a decade, and finally east to a hotel in Redlands, to be ready for the next day's adventures. It was my first time traveling without a map - a nüvi GPS device was my guide - and I'm still trying to reconcile the sense of benefiting from local knowledge and the complete absence of any bigger map of my trajectory. (Don't worry about the photo; my eyes were on the road!)