We woke up in Williams, Calif., this morning to a flat tire on the Subaru. It turned out to be a metal shard, which we probably picked up driving through the wreckage of the rather complicated rain accident on I-5 yesterday. Ah well. It gave us a chance to repack the car (what a thrill) and then, gingerly, on the donut spare, to drive out to a wildlife refuge east of Williams and go for a very pleasant walk through cottonwoods and oak trees by the side of a canal. While the tire was being fixed we flushed a barn owl, saw a couple great horned owls, scoured the trees for a woodpecker and generally enjoyed ourselves in a humid, cool country morning that felt as much like Alabama as California.

Back on the road, we laid down miles all the way to LA, where we arrived just in time for 5 o’clock traffic. Coming into town, I drove the Diamond Lane for the first time in my life, whizzing weirdly past the slower one-to-a-car traffic. (Speed in LA is relative. We were going 80 in the Diamond Lane. They were going 70 in the other five lanes.)

Being an LA kid, I hopped off the freeway and took Noah for a quick tour — this is a city he doesn’t know — of Mulholland Drive, Beverly Hills, Sunset Boulevard and my old high school, the house I grew up in and the beach. LA was more fun to drive around in than I had remembered. We landed for dinner at a cozy Italian place in Playa del Rey, marveling at good cheap food in a place that was packed on a Monday night with Angelenos, all of them wearing required LA black and talking a little too loud and aggressively.

Now we’re hunkered down in a Culver City hotel with a nice view of the San Diego Freeway, which will lead us out of town and into the desert to Campo tomorrow, though we plan on sleeping in a little to miss morning traffic.

Hard for either of us to get our minds around the fact that Noah is embarking on a 2,600-mile solo hike on Wednesday. That kind of thing doesn’t easily compute.