the lengths I go to

This evening found Nos. 1 and 3 on the way to LAX to have dinner with the school Paul (this is as opposed to the church Paul), who had a few hours of layover to spend.

[I appear to be under some kind of curse when it comes to driving and people named Paul. For the church Paul the curse is manifested with forgetting-to-turn-on-my-headlights incidents; for the school Paul it's getting lost -- really bad lost (which may all be because I complained about not getting lost enough during the weekend in Switzerland).]

So, back to the story, No. 1 was under a strange confusion about the respective offramps of the 405 and 105, and ended up off the freeway in Inglewood somewhere.

It was not the best part of town.

The conversation in the car was nevertheless blithe, almost jocund, until No. 3 figured out maybe something was wrong.

No. 3: Are we lost?
No. 1: No. We . . . just need to figure out which direction the planes are going in.
No. 3: Oh.
No. 1: Look! It's a plane!
No. 3: It's a Southwest plane!
No. 1: Is it going up or down?
No. 3: Uhhhhhhh. I think it's going down.

That was the beginning of sorrows. As they drove about looking for a safe-ish place to U-turn, No. 1 casually mentioned, "I'm going to blog this."

No. 3 looked out at Inglewood, the airplanes, the smog, and the gathering dusk and said, "Tell me you didn't set this up just so you could blog about it."

No.

About five minutes later they were back on the 105 going a very wrong way on a very very very long overpass highly populated with barely-moving cars.

No. 3: This is the world's longest bridge!
No. 1: Yeah. What if there's an earthquake?
::silence::
No. 3: I wish I would've done more nice things for people to talk about at my funeral. At least I got "A"s on my midterms. I wonder if they'd have a joint funeral or separate ones.

About this time Paul called. No. 3 briefly explained their situation in the most positive (though geographically ambiguous) terms.

"I believe you," said Paul.

::sigh::

(If you were wondering, we're home now.)