Pictures from this part of the trip can be found in Gallery.
Our Delta flight from MSP to LAX left at 7:30am, so it was an early morning for us. We were out of the house by 5:30am, so Ken could drop Julie off, and then get the car over to the lot and take the employee shuttle back to the airport. Fortunately, lines weren't very long.
When we got to LA, it was a lot warmer than we expected — mid 90s F. We changed into shorts in the airport, then found the car rental shuttle and picked up our car, a white VW Jetta. From there, we immediately headed to Pasedena.
In Pasedena, we randomly picked a commercial district and looked around for lunch. We ended up at a place called Float, where we each had a sandwich and a float. Julie had a pesto chicken sandwich and an orange dreamsicle float. Ken had a pastrami sandwich and a root beer float — and got to pick from a bunch of different bottled root beers (he chose Virgil's, a fond memory from our trip to Astoria, Oregon a few years ago).
After finishing lunch, we drove a few minutes further into Pasedena to visit The Huntington, a botanical garden and library. It was HOT, and Ken in particular had a difficult time adjusting to to it as we walked around the huge garden area. Eventually, we cooled off in one of the library buildings, where we got to see some interesting rare books. We saw probably half of the place before deciding to leave and go to the hotel. On our way out of Pasedena, we drove by the Rose Bowl to say we had seen it, but the views weren't very good from the road.
We didn't have too much trouble finding our hotel, the Hollywood Pensione, a boutique hotel with 4 rooms, housed in a 1915 Craftsman-style house. We immediately liked it. However, the driveway is very narrow and even when trying to be careful, Ken smacked the passenger-side mirror on the car — fortunately, in the direction it folds.
The hotel manager gave us a dinner recommendation, so we got settled into the hotel and then walked a few blocks to dinner at Franklin & Company. We sat outside on the sidewalk patio and people-watched while having some great food. We decided that our first two meals in California had been better than any two meals we had during 3 weeks in Scotland last year (although that might tell you more about Scotland than about California).
On our walk back to the hotel, we stopped at a grocery store and bought some food to store in our fridge back at the hotel. (Each room had its own fridge in the shared kitchen space.) The hotel provides muffins and fruit for breakfast, but we decided to buy some yogurt and breakfast drinks.
For our first full day in Los Angeles, we decided to hit the road early. We were apparently up and eating breakfast before anyone else in the hotel was awake. The shared kitchen has a small covered porch overlooking the back-yard parking area, which was a pleasant place to eat breakfast.
After finishing breakfast, we got in the car (being careful not to smack the mirror again) and headed to the La Brea Tar Pits. Our goal was to get there right when it opened. We really enjoyed the tar pits, which are really more properly called "asphalt seeps". The oily lake that everyone seems to know about is actually modern, a side-effect of mining in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
We learned that there is more than one type of fossil. The type we were familiar with is a "mineralized" fossil. However, La Brea's fossils are not mineralized. Instead, they are preserved by petroleum from the seeps. So, the entire bone structure still exists in its original form. Over tens of thousands of years, animals got stuck in the sticky asphalt, which eventually broke down their soft body parts but preserved the bones.
Once we finished up with the museum, we got a quick lunch at a nearby Mexican restaurant before going back to the museum to join the guided tour of the outside Tar Pit area, which took about an hour. This was really interesting, and we got to see some of the in-process archaeological digs.
When the guided tour was over, we headed next door to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (also known as LACMA), and spent the rest of the afternoon there. It's a big museum with a lot to look at, and we saw probably half of it. Perhaps our favorite part was the Japanese Art building, which was designed with very diffuse natural light.
Our evening entertainment was the Los Angeles Master Chorale, performing a 7:00pm Russian repertoire at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. As it started getting toward dinner time, we left LACMA and went back to the car to grab a change of clothes. We used the La Brea Museum's bathrooms to change into dressier clothes and then drove on city streets toward downtown, including a side trip through Beverly Hills to see what all of the fuss is about. We parked in the concert hall's parking garage and went looking for dinner.
Our dinner search was a bust. The area around the concert hall was pretty dead, and not many of the restaurants were open. It looks like the sort of place where most traffic happens during the work day. We finally settled on California Pizza Kitchen, which sounded better than Subway.
After finishing dinner, we both felt a little better, so we walked around some more in the area of the concert hall, getting an outside look at The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, LA's Catholic cathedral.
We headed into the concert hall about 15 minutes before the concert started. We were surprised at how big it seems, because there are several different levels and a lot of stairs. However, the performance space itself is only slightly bigger than Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis. Interestingly, the Disney hall has some seating behind the orchestra, so the performance is in the round.
We really enjoyed the concert. The Master Chorale is a top-notch group, and we liked the selection of music a lot — almost all of it was new to us.
During the concert's intermission, we went out on the balcony with the crowds to view the so-called blood moon, which everyone was excited about. On the way back home, we got a little lost leaving the parking garage with the crowds of other cars, so we had to pull over and use the phone to figure out where we were. After that, it was a short 15-minute hop back home to the hotel, even though we got into bumper-to-bumper freeway traffic at 10:30pm!
First thing in the morning Monday, we drove our car to the Warner Bros studio for a tour. We had a 9:30am reservation, but got there early because the drive was shorter than we anticipated. Fortunately, they let us go on the 9:00am tour instead.
We ended up on a tour cart with only two other people, which was kind of nice. Much of what the guide talked about (shows, movies, etc.) were not things that we typically watch, but the behind-the-scenes things were interesting. We saw some set pieces (i.e. buildings that are fake inside), interesting Harry Potter artifacts (the Hogwarts Sorting Hat put Julie into Gryffindor), and the actual car from the new Batman movie that hasn't been released yet. Overall, we thought the tour was probably worth it, even though it was pretty expensive at $124 for about 2 hours. The tour guide seemed to expect a tip, which we felt was a bit much to ask given how expensive the tickets were.
When the tour was over, it was basically lunch time, so we drove a short distance to Porto's Bakery & Cafe in Burbank, sort of a Los Angeles institution which was full of locals on their lunch break. We each had a sandwich, which came with home-fried plaintains. We also had some really good pastries from the pastry case.
After lunch, we drove back toward Hollywood, intending to see the Walk of Fame. In Hollywood, we had difficulty finding somewhere to park. Eventually, we realized that we were only about 2 blocks from our hotel. So, we parked the car at the hotel and walked both directions down the Walk of Fame. Hollywood Boulevard ranges from seedy in some areas to something akin to the Las Vegas strip in other areas. The people watching was fun, but it was hot and crowded. It turned out to be a very long walk in the end, longer than we had expected. By the time we got back to the hotel, we needed a break, so we both took a nap and Julie took a shower.
For the evening, we decided to go to the Upright Citizens Brigade improv theater, right next door to Franklin & Company (where we had dinner on Saturday night). The long line in front of the theater had piqued our interest. UCB is both a theater and an improv school, and they do 3-4 performances each night, every day of the week. Admission was only $6, so we bought tickets online for the 6:30pm show. The performance lasted a little more than an hour, split between two different comedy teams. The audience looked mostly local, mostly young people in their 20s, but there were a few other people our age and older. It turned out to be a lot of fun.
After the performance, we stepped next door to Franklin & Company again
for dinner and ate outside on the sidewalk again. They were offering half-price
beer and bottles of wine, and the older woman next to us (who we would later learn
was traveling on business and staying nearby) had clearly bought an entire
bottle of wine for herself. We had an amusing 15-minute conversation with her
while waiting for our food, which started when she almost fell out of her chair
trying to pick up her napkin. :)
On our way back home, we picked up a few more groceries, and ran into one of the actors from the second improv team. We had also seen 5-6 of the other actors walking on the sidewalk as we had dinner. So, we got the sense a lot of them must live in the neighborhood. That's maybe not surprising, since we were smack in the middle of a residential Hollywood neighborhood.
Tuesday, we left the car parked all day. We left the hotel before breakfast and walked to the subway station at Hollywood and Western. From there, we took the subway downtown to LA's Union Station, which is the last of the "great" railway stations ever built in the U.S.
From Union Station, we walked 10 minutes to a little restaurant called Philippe's, another Los Angeles institution. We stood in line with locals and both bought "The Combo" — french toast, eggs, bacon or sausage, and orange juice. After finishing breakfast, we walked back to Union Station and caught another train out to the free California Science Center.
Our walk into the museum was a little longer than expected, because there was a film crew with a huge green screen blocking our way in. This was a new experience for us, but we saw a film crew at least once every day we were in LA.
The museum was really empty. We get the sense that it gets most of its traffic on weekends. We wandered around a little and then paid for the IMAX film "Hubble 3D", where we were the only ones in the huge theater other than two elementary school groups.
After the IMAX movie, we grabbed a fairly decent lunch at the museum before heading to the highlight of our visit, the Space Shuttle Endeavor. Wow! Ken was a little overcome by the opportunity to be in the same room with it, almost close enough to touch. It took him back to the time when he had a poster of the shuttle on his bedroom wall (in 5th or 6th grade, before Challenger was lost).
After finishing up with Endeavor, we took some more time to explore the museum. We particularly liked the exhibits about tidal ecosystems (which had a big pump to simulate waves) and the space exhibits (which included an actual space capsule). We also enjoyed watching a group of school kids near a display that simulated flash floods in slot canyons like Zion. They got drenched and loved it.
Once we finished up at the museum, we took the train back to downtown, and decided to walk the 30-40 minutes from the station to the Japanese American Museum. It was a hot walk, and the "feel" of the city changed substantially even from block to block. Some blocks were clean and clearly dominated by office-type people, and then the next block over we would find lots of homeless people and alleys full of trash.
At the Japanese American Museum, we spent most of our time in a special exhibit about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. It was a sobering exhibit.
After finishing up at the museum, we took a break at Starbucks to get out of the heat and then took a train to Chinatown. This turned out to be a bust, because everything was closed. Apparently, Chinatown is open about 3 days a week. So, we wandered around a little and eventually ended up in Little Mexico, which was a bit more interesting. We took another break in a public square which would not have looked out of place in Barcelona, before walking back to Union Station to head back toward home.
We got off the train on Hollywood Boulevard and spent the next 30 minutes on a fruitless search for a restaurant that turned out to be closed, a much longer walk than expected. Eventually, we decided on Plan B and ended up at 25 Degrees, an upscale burger place in the neat Art Deco Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. On the way there, we walked past an outdoor stage where Jimmy Kimmel was recording live. The view was blocked from the street, but people were trying to look through the fence and standing on chairs with their cameras.
Fortunately, we were able to take the train back most of the way to hotel after dinner. However, we still got back later than intended, and we had to do laundry before going to bed (using the hotel's free washer/dryer). In order to wash as many sweaty clothes as possible, we got creative — Ken wore nothing but his swim suit for the next few hours. While waiting for the laundry to finish, we packed up the rest of our stuff and got ready to leave the next day.
Our toilet died overnight (the chain broke), which made for a slightly interesting morning. We got the car packed after breakfast, and checked out of the hotel fairly early again. Our first stop was the Griffith Observatory in the hills just a few minutes from the hotel.
The observatory wasn't open, so we just looked at the outside and walked around the grounds. Since the observatory is so high in the hills, it offers a great view of the Hollywood sign and of the Los Angeles metro area as a whole.
From there, we drove back down to Sunset Boulevard and drove city streets all of the way from Hollywood to Santa Monica on the coast, including another trip through Beverly Hills. In Santa Monica, we found parking (surprisingly difficult) and grabbed a nice little seafood lunch at Santa Monica Seafood Market & Cafe.
After lunch, we headed down toward the water and spent a few hours walking along the seaside cliffs and eventually down to the beach and the Santa Monica Pier. The walk was pretty, but kind of odd in some ways — every shaded piece of grass or shaded bench was taken by a homeless person with their cart of stuff. It was also quite hot again today (mid-90s F), and we were glad to get back into the air conditioned car for the drive up the coast to Ventura Beach.
In Ventura Beach, we had no problem finding our hotel, the Motel 6. It was cheap, clean, and convenient. Since we weren't very hungry yet, we spent a while repacking our gear to prepare for our Channel Islands trip. After repacking everything, we got into the car and headed to Ventura city center, where we had dinner at the Busy Bee Cafe, the only diner we've ever been to where the meal combos come with soda, iced tea, or beer ... and dessert.
After dinner, we spent some time walking around Ventura and ended up down at the beach for a little while, before driving back to the hotel. On our way back, we found the marina we'd need to be at the next morning, and we also stopped by a grocery store and picked up the last of the food we'd need for camping.