There were supposed to be more hours to kill in paradise on that Thursday morning.
I’d gone Into The Mystic the evening prior, staying up later than advisable if not for the anticipation of a morning spent peacefully under a puffed white duvet until the haze of morning had faded in the straightaway, until the light of day would assume its rightful place atop the podium.
A canceled flight, sleep rubbed out of eyes, and a harried phone call meant a manic sprint down the 101 in the same sparkling cordovan Kia Cadenza that had carried me up to Santa Barbara from Los Angeles three days earlier.
Somewhere in the middle I made one wrong move. With the Bluetooth volume too low, an exit was missed. This mis-manueaver landed me on a rerouted path through the twisting city hills of Sherman Oaks, a pretty place that felt like home, if my home was framed by palm trees and could fetch a cool million on the open market.
Navigating the Cadenza into and out of a series of sharp hilly turns, I weaved through streets lined with homes and cars that could pass for a classic Hollywood film set, an idyllic suburban neighborhood full of happy families surrounding dinner tables, filling the air with laughter, of doggies begging for treats with hopeful eyes as strings of slobber wave haphazardly as an excitable child would, and of dads playing catch in yards with daughters and sons clad in Dodger blue.
The Cadenza fits perfectly into this movie, perfectly at home in la la land.
Inside and out, that car, Kia’s most underrated ride, their most luxurious ride, fit perfectly in those perfect frames as I flipped past them in a mad dash, with a flickering light exposing perfectly imperfect lives in the suburbs of Los Angeles; where palm trees soar and cut the sun into pieces, where dogs wait for their masters to cut engines in black asphalt driveways, where kids still want a cut of their parents’ time to toss a ball around in the yard, and where parents want the same.
*Kia so kindly included me on this #KiaSBExp trip to Santa Barbara. All expenses and travel were covered. All opinions are my own and accounts of events are honest as I recall them. These are all press photos from Kia, not my own from this journey. There was no time for that, no time for a photo from this detour.
