The photograph above is a picture of the sunrise at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), taken from the Virgin Atlantic Clubhouse. This is the last photo I took during my one-day trip, but I decided to lead with it because it’s the one and only photo I took on my real camera. Unfortunately, everything else I have is of potato quality from my ~6-year-old phone.
I feel like I should just go and get a real estate license at this point, because Tempo Storm is in the process of exploring other real estate options… which I am coordinating, of course. Back in November 2016, one of the first team houses that Tempo Storm set up was a group effort between me and the administrative assistant at the time. Since then, I’ve set up three more team houses, and this new property we’re looking at now will end up being the fourth that I lead myself (sixth total for the company). Each team house we’ve gotten has been an upgrade from the previous, and that trend isn’t ending anytime soon.
For this trip, I wasn’t able to spend 10 hours on the road round-trip because I was a bit too busy with other work, so I decided to fly this time. I flew out yesterday morning, making it into the airport by 5 AM, grabbing some free breakfast at the airport lounge, boarding the plane shortly after 6, and making it to Los Angeles before 8.
After arriving at Los Angeles International Airport, I realized that all the car rental companies were off-site, so I had to stand at a curb waiting for a shuttle to stop by and bring me just under three miles to Enterprise Rent-a-Car, which was where my car rental reservation was. After entering the lobby of the Exotic Car Collection by Enterprise to pick up an SUV, they queued me up to receive one of their Cadillac Escalade ESVs… except they couldn’t find the keys to any of them.
The first one that was most easily accessible in their garage was locked and just had the keys missing entirely. The second one that was behind another vehicle was unlocked and started up with its push-button start, except they couldn’t actually find the keys to this vehicle. Seeing as it started up, the key fob was definitely inside… they just couldn’t figure out where. Here is a photo of two customer service representatives flipping the interior upside-down trying to find out where the key fob was.
Eventually, they gave up and found a third Cadillac Escalade ESV that had its keys conveniently in the cup holder, and they gave me that one. It was a 2020 model, but I was able to see first-hand why Cadillac Escalades are often rated as one of the worst luxury full-size SUVs on the market today—they feel a bit dated compared to competitors. Enterprise comped me a half tank of fuel for the wait, which was nice, but I was only in town for a day and there was no way I would use 13 gallons of free fuel.
After I actually got on the road, picked up our CEO, and started going on tours, I forgot to take as many photos as I would’ve hoped, but I did take two from the Hills overlooking Los Angeles.
After wrapping up the day, I spent the night at my cousin’s house, and the following morning, I was up by 4 AM, out the door by 5, and at the airport lounge having breakfast by 6—which is where we can loop back to the first photo above. I was on my plane by 7 and back home in Las Vegas before 9, thus concluding a hectic one-day trip to Beverly Hills.
I bought my truck new on July 30, 2018, so it took right around 14 and a half months to hit 10,000 miles. Most people hit 10,000 right around the one-year mark because they commute back and forth from work. I have the luxury of working remote and not needing to commute daily, but I also do quite a bit of road travel with my truck for business purposes going back and forth between Las Vegas and SoCal and driving all over SoCal, so I guess that’s comparable to most people’s daily commute.
We’ve more-or-less secured the new property in the Hills for Tempo Storm, so I don’t want to give too many additional details in order to maintain confidentiality, but I do have a few photos that I took from the Hills when we were on the way back down to Beach Cities after our tours:
I’m pretty excited for this new property (to be clear, it’s not the white house pictured above), as I feel like the one we picked is a unicorn house, in that it’s particularly stellar for its price point. It has a huge “wow” factor, the architecture is amazing, and it has a lot of innate features that make it extremely convenient for our purposes.
After wrapping everything up, I headed back east and visited my aunt and uncle’s home up in the Santa Ana Mountains on my way back to Las Vegas. Of course, a visit to the mountains wouldn’t be complete without yet again another small photo shoot with my truck.
I have family visiting this coming weekend, then I’ll have about a week and a half of time to myself before even more travel—I’ll be headed to the Anaheim Convention Center for BlizzCon 2019 as my next trip.
