Friendly Competition

There are only a handful of businesses in the country that do what we do at Mountain Electronics: fix computer boards from coin-laundry machines. Three of our competitors are located in California, and upon examination of that 2 page Rand-McNally map of LA that I mentioned earlier, we realized that all three of these repair outfits are located in and around Los Angeles. So we decided to spend a couple of days meeting our competition. We do business regularly with two of the businesses, so we called them to see if we could drop by.

Jim and Shelly Stavros own and operate Super Computer Boards, based in Huntington Beach, CA. It was a lot of fun to finally meet "the man behind the voice" that I've talked to so often on the phone. Jim and Shelly were so sweet to us. They took us out for lunch at Duke's, a great fish restaurant with a Hawaiian surfer flare, named after the famous Hawaiian surfer, Duke Kahanamoku, who brought surfing to the mainland and made Huntington Beach the surfing capital of America.

After lunch, we walked out on the Huntington Beach Pier.

From the pier, we had a great view of all the surfers. Those dots in the water are surfer's heads, waiting for a good wave.

George catches a good wave . . .

. . . in his dreams!

We spent a wonderful afternoon in Huntington Beach, and "Uncle Jim" even bought a Huntington Beach kitty-cat T-shirt for Adalaya, who shares her love of cats with Shelly. Thank you, Jim and Shelly, for lunch and showing us the highlights of your beautiful town!

Next on the business agenda was a drive north to Venice Beach, where we stayed overnight in order to be near ALJ Electronics for tomorrow's meeting.

We biked the beach strip between the Venice Beach Pier and the Santa Monica Pier, and saw many interesting sights.

They have the nicest skate park I've ever seen there.

I figured this was the "medical park" of the strip: medical marijuana and botox injections.

And there were some fantastic birds posing for pictures on the pier.

Our last, but certainly not least, stop in the LA area was a visit to ALJ Electronics in El Segundo. We met Carolyne and Darryl in person and, once again, it was great to put faces with familiar voices. We enjoyed sharing stories of our experiences in the laundry industry with each other.

Now that business is taken care of, it's time for us to "boogie town," and after a few more hours of driving, we should be out of LA.