Wake up in Santa Barbara, and everything is mild and sunny and upbeat, even from the vantage point of a Motel 6, and then the drive down the 101 to Los Angeles, which I know too well and have too much information about, and poof, vacation/reverie over.

Conditions may be the same in the northern two-thirds of the state, which I just toured and liked (a lot) and I just don’t know it … but I feel like I can almost smell the rot in Southern California.

Same bad commutes over the same crumbling freeways, and you wonder how many people in the stopping-and-starting cars around you have jobs and how many have given up, and every block seems to have a vacant storefront and variations on the same hideous scrawls of graffiti. Ugh.

If it weren’t for all the family here, we wouldn’t be crawling over the Sepulveda Pass at middway and wondering where everyone is going when Los Angeles is one just one big economic Dead Zone.

Ah, but the weather! Not as mild as up north, but nice enough, and won’t a good climate eventually attract a decent economy? I’d like to think so … though I may not live to see it.

Long Beach has some activity downtown, where a new courthouse is going up and a mixed-use development across the street has been completed since we left … but we still see lots of vacant stores where business were taking a shot at profitability, two years ago.  And Second Street on Belmont Shore still looks healthy enough, but upon closer inspection this that and the other business has been replaced by something else nearly as precious and precarious.

Then the drive out to San Bernardino, which is just flat on its back, and the “game” is more “what is still here and open?” more than “what’s closed?” Ah, the Target! Still here! Oh, the Mervyns on Highland … still empty. Carousel Mall … still dead.

I guess I’m more surprised that maybe 80 percent of adults are employed, unless those “no longer looking for work” are an even bigger fraction than I’m led to believe.

Sigh. The return to reality … the down side of every vacation.