Damn Richers

So I took my little jaunt to Southern California this weekend for work; I got back yesterday evening. The being in SoCal part was good and fine. I took an afternoon drive on Sunday down the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) to Laguna Beach and then turned around and went up nearly to Long Beach. It's a good place to drive, though it can be pretty trafficky, which detracts from the Hollywood image of freely cruising up and down the idyllic Pacific coast in a convertible. Oh, and portions of it are flanked by oil derricks on the right and offshore oil platforms on the right. Pretty scenic stuff.

Speaking of cars, I saw possibly every major brand and model of luxury car while in and around the 5-star Newport Beach hotel in which I stayed. Upon pulling into the hotel the first night, there was a yellow Lamborghini just sitting there. Next to it was Bentley and a MB SLR McLaren. The next evening there was a Ferrari parked on the curb outside of the restaurant we went to, which is really intelligent since that's the place it's most likely to get hit. But hey, what's a couple hundred thousand dollars? The next day I saw one or two more Bentley's, a Rolls Royce, a Maserati, and another Ferrari. Aside from the superstar sightings, there were, of course, an innumerable quantity of Mercedes SLs, BMW 7-series, Land Rovers and Porche Cayennes. I'm not counting the Orange County Lamborghini dealership (next to a yacht dealership) that I passed, either. I'm not so impressed by the cars themselves but by the amount of money it takes to acquire said cars. Where the hell did these people get so much money, and why are they all in exactly the same place? Should I have answered that Nigerian guy's email afterall? I thought it was a scam!

The people who were driving these cars were a REAL interesting breed of rich douchebag scum, by the way. It looked like were really trying to pull off the West Coast vibe and the Long Island daddy's boy look at the same time. For all their real estate profits I guess they still couldn't afford a decent image consultant. You might have seen some of them featured on Hot Chicks With Douchebags.

So as I pull up into the big fancy hotel lined with big fancy cars in my rental Nissan Sentra whose stated color was "Sparkles", you can imagine what the valets are thinking. On the contrary, however, I gave them $2 instead of $1, except I only tipped them when they went to get it, not when I dropped it off.