Kidding. There is no such thing as a good time overload, unless you’re Shane MacGowan, maybe. Our good times relate to the fact that for most of the next month we are taking one great trip after another. First up, this past week we went to Catalina Island to a bit belatedly celebrate Chuck’s 65th birthday. When he turned 55, I took him to Catalina for his first trip there ever. So it seemed fittingly full circle-ish to come back ten years later. Last time we stayed at the Hotel Metropole. This time we took advantage of a really fabulous deal and stayed at the Pavilion Hotel.

The Pavilion is an older hotel located just past the pier where you disembark from the ferries. It’s a really easy five minute walk (though they send an employee down to the ferry to gather everyone’s bags and deliver them to your room – a nice touch!). I must have walked by this place a zillion times but had never noticed it before. It’s very motel-like in appearance, with two stories that wrap around a central courtyard that’s been redone as a big garden with lots of seating areas and a fire pit. The rooms have all been redecorated and refurbished with very nice beds, flat screen TV’s, iPod clock radios. We ended up in a standard room which was nice but small. They have bigger rooms with patios or balconies that I think I’d look at if I stay there again. There’s a wine and cheese hour daily from 4:30-5:30pm and they don’t stint on the wine or the cheese(though with the number of kids there it was tough keeping up with the demand!). They are shooting for a boutique hotel vibe, and come very close. When we were walking around Avalon on Friday, we found a hotel that looked really interesting that we’d like to try next time: the Villa Portofino. It’s closer to the Casino, a bit further away from the hustle and bustle of downtown.

The deal I got included two nights at the hotel, two round trip tickets on the Catalina Express (that we upgraded to the Commodore Lounge for $60), a meal voucher worth $100 at the Avalon Grille, AND two tickets for the Catalina Zip Line Eco Tour. There might have been more freebies, but we literally ran out of time to take advantage of them (I think we could have gone climbing on the rock wall, for instance). All of this came at the whopping price of $479 including tax. If you price all of the stuff out individually, the hotel room was basically free. And lest you think we scored the deal of a lifetime, just look at the various Catalina Island hotel websites and click on the links to packages and prepare to be amazed, all courtesy of, it appears, the Santa Catalina Island Company. Whatever, there are some awesome deals to be had!

We did the Zip Line tour on Thursday and it was, I kid you not, one of the most thrilling things I’ve done in my life. I was absolutely terrified on the bus up to the first zip, right down to the quaking knees, but our guides Jimmy and Eric (I can’t say enough great things about them – if you do the tour, ask for them!) were amazing – they were silly and fun, but dead serious about safety and Jimmy, bless his heart, pushed us all off the zips (he referred to it as “helping”), effectively preventing us from chickening out. After the first zip and the realization that I was not, in fact, going to die out there I began to relax and really enjoy the ride. Chuck, thrill seeker that he is, loved it from start to finish. There were nine people in our group (there should have been ten but one person bowed out at the start), and we ranged in age from early 20’s to mid-seventies. You clearly don’t need to be a jock to zip, just able to walk up stairs and not have a heart attack when you zip out over the canyon. The zip line basically runs from the top of Descanso Canyon down to the Descanso Beach Club so you get a great view of the canyon and the harbor. And just like at Disneyland’s Splash Mountain, they have a camera that snaps a pic of you as you come in on the last zip and the photos are waiting to be purchased as you exit (we had to buy our pics, of course).

We got home late Friday and then yesterday started things off with a race (one of the L.A. Sheriff’s Athletic Association’s Mug Run series). it was Chuck’s second race as a 65-year-old and he came in second in his age group for the 5K (he’s resigned himself to the fact that to win his age group he’s going to need to keep running for at least another 15 years). I came in first in my age group in the 10K, and beat a time I’ve been chasing since last year, so feel fully recovered from my broken foot. It rained off and on throughout the race and for the rest of the day so happily the rest of our activities were indoors – we went to the International Printing Museum to see the L.A. premiere of a new documentary called Linotype: The Film, a charming film that is as much about (more, actually) the people who ran the machines as it is about the machines themselves. The museum itself was wild, full of old printing presses that still work and hobbyists who are among the few left who actually know how to run and service the machines. I can’t recommend the film or the museum highly enough. And if all film premieres were as much fun (and as small and intimate) as this one, I might try to go to them more often!

So there you have it, the first part of our month of good times. Part two is coming soon. More on that later. Oh, and here are some pics.