12 Days of Mugger - Day 8

Go West Young Vagabonds

In 2000 Kristen and I packed our stuff and moved out to California. I was going to be famous teleprompter-operator in Hollywood and Kristen would begin work for the Red Cross for whom she’s still with today. We lived in Burbank for several months before we heard that Mugger was being stationed out in San Diego to continue his pursuit of medicine. By this time, Kristen and I had Zero friends between us on the west coast, so we were beside ourselves with excitement to have some family nearby.

By the time it was all over we would wear out I-5 from San Diego to LA and vice versa. I still remember the first visit from Mugger to our little apartment in Burbank. With the exception of a few pub crawl visits to State College and graduations etc, we really hadn’t spent much quality time together since we were kids and I think I detailed what type of quality time that was in the earlier posts. Just before Mugger’s visit Kristen was making a grocery store run to Ralphs and asked me what he liked to eat. I told her he seemed to like fruit roll ups from what I remember.

We were new still new to LA so we explored much of the city together with Mugs. Malibu, Santa Monica, Universal Studios and any number of dive bars and pubs from Pasadena to North Hollywood.

An Officer & a Gentleman

Same could be said for San Diego. We’d take turns visiting each other on the weekends. The Navy put him up in a little place in San Deigo’s Motel Mile called The Vagabond Inn. It wasn’t much to look at, but this was over ten years ago and we were coming from a little one-bedroom apartment in Burbank, so it might as well have been The Ritz. We had a pool, Captain Morgan, a hot tub and an unlimited ice supply. We really needed nothing else. For about a year or two we were tourists in our own towns. A couple cans of Tecate with lime and a fruit roll up and we were the Kings of California. The final two photos below are of our infamous reenactment of An Officer & a Gentleman. The one shot is me asking Kristen if she ‘wants Jets?!!’ The other is obviously the final scene when Richard Gere whisks Debra Winger from her factory job to end the movie. The Vagabond Inn had cable, but clearly we didn’t need it…