What is this life? Bonnie and I would ask each other all the time over the past nine months, as we got to taste what I can only assume people mean when they talk about “The Good Life.”

Bonnie works for a company with two offices about an hour away from each other in the most ideal of Southern California traffic conditions. During normal traffic conditions, however, the drive is usually closer to two hours and sometimes even longer than that.

The South Bay office was struggling, having been a new purchase whose books were padded before Bonnie’s boss acquired the territory. As such, she wanted Bonnie to spend two days a week at the southern office, and she would spend two days a week there to get the place in shape. It was decided that the owner would take Mondays and Tuesdays, and Bonnie would be there on Thursdays and Fridays.

She quickly realized that traffic was going to make travel between the offices an awful experience. If she left before traffic got bad in the morning and waited until it died down in the evening, it meant a 12 to 16-hour day. If she waited until traffic cleared in the morning and left before rush hour in the evening, she only had a few hours to work during the day. Neither situation was ideal; things were literally doubly worse when she had to turn around and do it all over again the next day.

So, a few times last year, Bonnie persuaded her boss to spring for a hotel room, so she would only have to make one round trip, work two full days, and maximize her productivity in the southern office. If memory serves, Bonnie was able to stay in a hotel exactly four times before her boss’s anxiety about all of these hotel stays put the kibosh on it.

I don’t know where she thought Bonnie was staying, or how much it was costing her, but she was wildly mistaken. You see, Bonnie’s boss comes from money. She was born into it. Then, she married into more money, divorced into money, married into money again, and runs a business that, despite her own best efforts, still manages to bring in seven figures annually. She is, to put it mildly, out of touch.

After an office happy hour and team-building dinner, Bonnie’s boss told her to enjoy her walk on the beach in the morning. That was her first clue that her boss didn’t have a clue about where she was staying or how much it cost. Apparently, her boss thought she was staying at some beachfront resort hotel. In reality, she was staying at the Sonesta at the corner of Interstate 5 and the Western Ave. off-ramp. She paid between $130 and $180 per night.

Still, her boss felt the hotel expenses were getting out of control, and they should rent a condo or apartment near the office because it would be cheaper than paying for so many hotel rooms each month. So, Bonnie started looking for condos and apartments for rent in Torrance, Hawthorne, Inglewood, and Lawndale, and she would send what she found to her boss, who, without mentioning a word to Bonnie, signed a lease for a second-floor, beachfront apartment in Redondo Beach. An apartment that we’ve come to affectionately refer to as The Redondo Condo.

Now, I’m not privvy to Bonnie’s boss’s finances, but I don’t need to be to know that she is spending way more to rent a beachfront condo than she was on a hotel room that was flanked by an interstate on one side and an off-ramp on the other. Bonnie and I have had many discussions about this, and we’ve come to the conclusion that her boss has no idea what non-luxury living costs.

So, for the better part of the past year, Bonnie and I have been the beneficiaries of her privileged ignorance. That’s not entirely true, of course. It wasn’t all about the cost of hotels. I think she really wanted a place at the beach, and this was just the perfect excuse. Whatever the reason, I was the real winner in this decision.

Bonnie and I were the first ones to stay here after the furniture was delivered and the internet was activated. Initially, we were coming down here on Wednesday nights and staying until Saturday. She would go to the office on Thursdays and Fridays, and I would spend my days exploring the pier and making videos in the apartment. Then, on Saturday, I would show her all of the cool shit I found while she was at work.

We tried most of the restaurants on the pier and in the marina, but we’re both so fucked up, it’s hard to find places where both or either of us can eat without getting sick, so once we did a lap of all the local fare, we started cooking all of our own meals.

Sometimes, cooking our own meals meant shopping at the farmer’s market that sprang up at break of day every Thursday. When the grocery store pops up outside your door once every week, it’s hard not to go shopping. One of the regular vendors makes pizzas. They set up four small propane-powered pizza ovens and cook a variety of pizzas. In the winter and early spring, I was experimenting with gluten because it seemed that I could tolerate it, but by the beginning of summer, I was off gluten again. Another vendor started coming at the start of spring, selling uncooked, “low-gluten” pizzas that you take home and cook in your oven. I tried those, too, but they weren’t as good.

I found the peace and quiet of the one-bedroom apartment the perfect place to work – a stark contrast to the crowded and noisy house I normally live in. I could write here with absolute concentration. There were no disruptions. It was paradise.

I’ve never been so productive as I was during the first few months we were here. I could sit, laser-focused on my work for hours, and when I hit a wall or needed a distraction, I could just get up, walk across the room to the balcony overlooking the beach, see what the people down below were up to, and then return to work. I could get used to this, I often thought to myself.

I also enjoyed walking down to the pier. I noticed that almost all of the little take-out windows sell soft serve, so I endeavoured to try them all. I found that this place had the best dipped cone.

I’m not sure if they gave me more ice cream or if the price-to-ice cream ratio was better than the others, but once I tried them all, I only returned here for dipped cones. It may have just been that they weren’t as stingy with the napkins as everyone else.

The Waterfront Pizzeria makes a good sundae. They give you whipped cream, sprinkles, and a cherry on top. Contrast that to this place where a sundae is a paper bowl filled with soft serve and covered with chocolate sauce.

It looked awful, but it was soooo good. It’s just too bad the employees acted like what their sundaes looked like. The last time I went there, both employees looked like they were trying to fight a heroin nod.

This place thinks a chocolate shake is made with chocolate ice cream. I imagine they think it reduces their cost by not having to use ice cream and chocolate syrup, but it only reduces their revenue because I’ll never go back.

This little marina is a happening spot. There are several bars that seem to do decent business all day long. On our last trip here, we walked down there on Friday night and discovered that what I thought was a busy, crowded bar scene was actually the slow time. At night, the crowds spill out into the walkway. People drink too much.

There’s a sign hanging over the marina that claims there is an amusement center somewhere in the vicinity, but after an exhaustive, months-long search, I still haven’t been able to locate it.

This ice cream shop only accepts cash. I thought I would be here to witness its inevitable closure, but to my surprise and befuddlement, it seems to do quite well. I can’t imagine why or who carries cash around.

Being able to take a break, walk down to the pier, get an ice cream cone, and be back up to the apartment in ten minutes was a dangerous habit that I knew I couldn’t and shouldn’t begin. Fortunately, by the end of March, the weather began to warm up, the lifeguards started patrolling the beach, and the pier became unpleasantly popular, which made it easy for me to avoid going there.

We spent Wednesday night through Saturday at the Redondo Condo throughout December, and it was lovely, but once the holidays were over, I found it harder to justify going on vacation for half of every week. Plus, it was quite a hassle to move twice each week. So, I started going with Bonnie once or twice a month.

In April, she went to a week-long conference, so we drove down to the condo on Sunday night. I drove her to the airport on Tuesday, and then I stayed at the condo until I picked her up from the airport on Saturday. That was peak heaven. A whole week in a beachfront condo.

After that, things changed. With the weather warming up, Bonnie’s boss wanted to spend more time at the condo, which threw a wrench into Bonnie’s schedule. I started to find it more difficult to work here, too.

For one thing, it was getting too warm. I needed to leave the sliding doors open all day just to keep the place from overheating, but that meant noise, and lots of it. Mostly it was the crashing of the waves onto the beach, but there was also the noise of the people down below, the engines of boats coming in and out of the harbor, and, of course…dogs. You can’t get away from them anywhere anymore.

All of the noise made it impossible to record inside the apartment, so I would have to close the door, but then, in a matter of minutes, I was drenched in sweat. There was also the problem of time. I’m not a morning person. It takes me a while to ease into my day, so I’m not usually ready to start working, in earnest, until late morning or early afternoon.

The problem with that is two-fold. First, we get in on Wednesday night, and then, first thing Thursday morning, the flea market opens up. It’s only open in the morning, and the pizza guy sells out early, so if I wanted to check out the market, and especially if I wanted pizza, I would have to get down there first thing. That meant I had to rush through my morning, and I don’t like that.

The bigger issue was that by about 3 p.m., the sun starts shining through the sliding glass doors, casting harsh, golden light on everything in the living room. That’s murder for continuity when I’m recording, so I have to get everything I need shot in the morning. So what ended up happening is that I would wake up in a panic on Thursday mornings, eat breakfast as quickly as I could, shower, dress, and get down to the market first thing, race back upstairs, and set up and shoot everything I need before the light changes. Then, on Fridays, I could shoot anything I didn’t get on Thursday, plus anything else I thought of.

So, this surreal little vacation home became an office for me, and at the same time, I found ways to drown out the chaos going on at home and figured out how to be more productive there. So, the Redondo Condo became less and less of a needed refuge and more of an inconvenience with a really nice view.

I think the biggest problem for me, though, was that I was spending so much time working that I wouldn’t leave the condo at all for the whole trip, and I started feeling like I was wasting this opportunity. I should be out exploring and seeing what there is to see out there instead of rotting away in this dingy apartment, I would think.

But then came Labor Day weekend. I was told this would be our last visit to The Redondo Condo, and since I had been told that our previous trip, three weeks earlier, would be our final trip, I believed that Labor Day weekend would truly be our last time staying at The Redondo Condo, and so I just wanted to enjoy myself. Plus, I had just acquired a DSLR and a telephoto lens, so I wanted to try them out.

I spent the three days on the balcony, watching the people, boats, helicopters, blimps, advertising planes, and sunsets through my new telephoto lens, and do you know what I learned about myself? I don’t want to participate. I don’t want to do the things and see the sights. I want to sit from a reasonable distance, with a good view, and watch the people doing things. I want to take pictures and video, and write about the things I saw, but make no mistake, I don’t want to be a part of anything.

So, now our time in The Redondo Condo is for realzies over. Even if we weren’t turning in the keys, the furniture is being picked up tomorrow, so there wouldn’t be much point in trying to stay here. Besides, I think I’ve gotten what I needed from this experience, and I can move on, having enjoyed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that I’ll remember for the rest of my life. And if spending nine months in an apartment, part-time, on someone else’s dime is what I needed to gain insight into myself and who I am, then I have to ask you this? Do you have a beachfront residence I could use?