In Accepting the Unexpected, I step away from writing about travel to comment on the bigger journey of life. While the topics may vary, the central theme is always the same: living life means learning to deal with the unexpected. I always prided myself in being a California baby. Not just a California baby, but a blond-haired, blue-eyed Southern California baby born to return to her homeland. When I was nine, my parents somehow scraped enough money together for our family to fly to California to visit some of their friends from the two years they had lived there. We explored Disneyland, visited the animals at the San Diego Zoo, and drove through the campus at Concordia College, Irvine, where I decided I was destined to be a college student so that I could become the California girl I knew I had always been destined to be.