My first trip to the American West involved a last-minute business assignment, warehouses, an electric car, several hamburgers, and considerably less sightseeing than the phrase “California trip” would suggest.
I went to the West Coast for the first time because, in the middle of a meeting, someone told me I was going on a business trip.
I had been at the company for approximately two months?
There are people who prepare for California by making restaurant reservations, compiling neighborhood maps, and purchasing linen. I prepared by discovering that nearby hotels were already unavailable, panic-booking an Airbnb, buying a plane ticket, and leaving that Sunday.
This was less California dreaming than California, apparently.
In retrospect, I saw very little of the West.
I breathed the air.
I looked at palm trees.
I drove through industrial districts.
I accidentally found myself in places I would have preferred to encounter in daylight.
Mostly, I worked.
Still, first trips have an advantage: almost everything qualifies as scenery.
Even the flight was entertaining.
For years, when flying between Korea and the United States, I had treated airplanes primarily as horizontal sleeping facilities. I watched movies, ate something of uncertain origin, and tried to become unconscious for as much of the Pacific as possible.
Flying from the East Coast to the West Coast was different.
I was awake.
Below me, the country kept changing.
Mountains appeared. Then vast empty stretches. Then patterns in the land that looked too large to have anything to do with people. From that altitude, the United States stopped feeling like a collection of states and started looking like an unnecessarily ambitious geology project.
I spent much of the flight staring out the window.
Apparently the view had been there all along.
The first thing I noticed after landing was warehouses.
Warehouses everywhere.
As someone working in logistics, I suppose this was the professional equivalent of arriving in Paris and seeing the Eiffel Tower.
California said hello in distribution centers.
The landscape seemed to alternate between broad roads, enormous boxes labeled with company names, trucks, more enormous boxes, and palm trees inserted periodically to remind everyone that this was technically Southern California.
My first meal was a MOOYAH burger.
This was unexpectedly excellent.
The fries in the photograph looked burned, but they were sweet-potato fries, which made their color less concerning.
I ate the whole thing with the enthusiasm of someone who had travelled across the country only to discover that the first great cultural experience awaiting her was still a hamburger.
America is consistent.
Then work began.
There is a particular fantasy attached to the words business trip when you have not taken many of them.
Hotels.
Restaurants.
A laptop opened elegantly beside a window.
Perhaps a mildly glamorous airport lounge.
In reality, a business trip mostly means performing your regular job while temporarily losing access to your regular bed.
The week moved quickly.
Warehouse.
Office.
Warehouse again.
Laptop.
Questions.
People explaining things.
Me asking additional questions.
Repeat.
At some point I took a picture that I later labeled, essentially, the life of a laborer.
California had become less a destination than a worksite with unusually good weather.
Fortunately, I was not alone.
Two coworkers, Toby and Aaron, looked after me exceptionally well. They took me out to eat, showed me around, answered questions, and generally prevented the week from becoming a fluorescent-lit study in corporate loneliness.
One meal involved pho with a piece of meat large enough to suggest a breakdown in portion-control standards.
I approved.
There is something about being fed by people in an unfamiliar place that makes a business trip feel less like temporary displacement and more like being received somewhere.
The work remained work.
But the week did not feel bleak.
This distinction matters more than companies tend to include in travel policy.
I did attempt tourism.
Technically.
One evening, exhausted enough to resemble a person being operated remotely, I went to an outlet mall because I thought I might never be in the area again.
This is terrible reasoning and has nevertheless motivated a significant percentage of my travel decisions.
I walked around in a mildly nauseated state, trying to convince myself that proximity created obligation.
Had I been rested, I might have browsed properly.
Instead, I mainly experienced retail as architecture.
There were also palm trees.
Many palm trees.
I photographed seven of them in one frame, which seemed sufficient documentation that I had indeed reached California.
Palm trees are funny when you are from the Northeast.
Californians presumably treat them as ordinary municipal vegetation.
To me, they functioned as evidence.
Look.
West Coast.
The more questionable excursion came later.
I wanted to see the Rim of the World Scenic Byway.
This was, in theory, an excellent idea.
Mountains.
Views.
A scenic drive.
What could possibly go wrong?
Quite a lot, apparently, once darkness becomes involved.
I found myself driving through areas that made me distinctly uncomfortable, heading toward increasingly narrow roads, increasingly higher elevations, and increasingly limited confidence in my own planning.
I had been warned that some of the surrounding neighborhoods could be rough, and navigating them at night did nothing to improve my imagination.
Eventually, instead of completing some triumphant ascent to an official scenic viewpoint, I simply stopped partway up and took pictures.
This was enough.
The view was genuinely beautiful.
The lights stretched below in a way that made the entire basin look enormous and strangely peaceful, which was ironic because I had spent much of the drive gripping the steering wheel like an emergency flotation device.
I would go again.
During daylight.
With planning.
Possibly with another human being.
This is called growth.
The next day, Toby and Aaron were not around, so I had lunch alone.
Normally, this would not deserve documentation.
But the weather was pleasant, there was a terrace, and for once I had enough time to sit outside instead of eating in the functional manner of someone refueling construction equipment.
So I sat there.
Food.
Sun.
California air.
Nothing urgent for a few minutes.
I have always been disproportionately susceptible to small scenes of leisure.
A beautiful terrace can make me believe I have solved my entire life.
Give me decent weather, an outdoor table, and forty uninterrupted minutes, and suddenly I am prepared to reconsider all previous definitions of success.
This usually lasts until the next email.
Still.
Romance where you can get it.
Near the end of the trip, I decided I needed to complete another important cultural assignment:
In-N-Out.
There are American burger chains people discuss as if they represent competing philosophical schools.
Five Guys.
Shake Shack.
In-N-Out.
Everyone has an argument.
I finally tried the third.
It was good.
Very good, even.
But the restaurant was packed. People were standing. Seats were scarce. Some customers were simply eating burgers while upright, which seemed like an excessive level of devotion to ground beef.
I am not passionate enough about hamburgers to suffer for them.
My assessment was therefore highly specific:
If an In-N-Out existed close enough to my house that I could walk there or order delivery without emotional investment, I would probably eat it about five times a year.
This is positive.
Shake Shack remains my favorite.
I recognize that entire regions of the country may reject this opinion.
They will survive.
The trip also gave me my first experience driving an electric car.
I expected this to feel futuristic.
Possibly silent.
Possibly strange.
Possibly as though the vehicle were considering my inputs rather than merely obeying them.
Instead, it mostly felt like driving a car whose internal combustion had been replaced by consumer electronics.
There was less engine noise.
Fewer dramatic mechanical sounds.
More of a sense that I had entered a very large appliance.
Otherwise:
car.
This was mildly disappointing and also reassuring.
Transportation innovation, it turns out, can be surprisingly normal once you are inside it.
By the final evening, I ate dinner, photographed the company building, and went back to work.
A fitting conclusion.
I had wanted to make better use of the trip.
Work intensely when working.
Rest properly when resting.
See California in the spaces between.
Instead, I developed a headache almost immediately, became absorbed in the assignment, and watched the week disappear.
This bothered me afterward.
There is a particular frustration in travelling somewhere for the first time and realizing that you were physically present but only intermittently available to experience it.
I had visited California.
Had I really seen California?
Not particularly.
I had seen warehouses.
A mountain road.
A terrace.
Palm trees.
Several burger restaurants.
An outlet mall while vaguely ill.
Perhaps this was not the canonical West Coast experience.
But it was mine.
And, strangely, I liked it.
The traffic felt less oppressive than I expected. The weather was easy. The roads seemed more relaxed than the Northeast. There was no snow threatening future negotiations. The industrial areas were enormous, but beyond them I could sense an entire landscape I had barely touched.
That may have been what stayed with me most.
Not the sense that I had finished seeing the West, but the opposite.
I had barely opened it.
Business travel is a poor substitute for tourism but an unexpectedly good way to observe a place.
You see the airport.
The commute.
The office parks.
The warehouses.
The restaurants where coworkers actually eat.
The roads after everyone else has gone home.
You learn what distances people consider normal.
You discover whether a place feels exhausting or easy before anyone has had the chance to sell it to you.
And because I spent the week with kind people, even the work itself became part of the memory rather than something I needed to mentally delete afterward.
I asked questions.
I watched how things operated.
I learned things I would never have understood remotely.
Time moved quickly.
There are worse ways to spend a week.
I had gone west because somebody assigned me to.
I came back thinking I would like to return voluntarily.
Next time, preferably without an emergency booking.
With fewer headaches.
During daylight.
And perhaps with enough free time to discover something California is famous for besides warehouses and hamburgers.
Until then, I had one practical wish for the place.
After personally flying across the country to inspect the operation, the West Coast had better achieve excellent on-time shipping.
Hey Christine? 
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