One Full Day

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This is the third post in a series; fourth if you count the prologue. You really should read them in order, so click on this link for the Prologue or on this link for Part One. And if you want to see all the pictures from this trip, click here. 

Thursday in Los Angeles

 I woke up at about 4AM on Friday morning and realized that I suddenly possessed at complete understanding of the craft of computer coding; that any of the little issues I observed in this, Hank and my first travel experience together, could be solved by simply correcting errors in the coding that created us. We are just characters running in some kind of gigantic complex simulation and yada yada yada

 Then I realized that I could scale up this vast knowledge and expertise I had found within myself, to solve greater problems in the world. I seem to recall it had something to do with the Israel-Hamas war -- this is about where I start forgetting dreams -- and Cheeto Jesus and I was in the middle of composing my Nobel acceptance speech when I drifted back to sleep; and when I woke up again to the cold, grey light of day (because it's dawned cloudy here in Los Angeles) I felt the suspicion that I might not, after all, be awarded a prize for ... well, pretty much anything.

 I've known Hank for more than thirty years now, and we've been good friends for basically all that time. Well, you know, it's easier when you live in separate cities and go for months without exchanging so much as a text greeting, and years without seeing each other. I actually have a lot of acquaintances that I could call friends just on the basis of my relationship with Hank, except that in most of the other cases, I don't have the same good feelings about the other people. I like Hank in a way I don't feel drawn to some of the other relationships that fit the same description. And I think he feels much the same way. Or maybe he's a better actor than I give him credit for. Whatever.

 So this is Hank's first time in L.A., and he's been looking forward to this trip for some time. I have to keep reminding myself how important this long weekend is to him, because his desire to experience the area is a little more spare-no-expense than I can muster; I have, I guess, too many years as a practicing pennypincher to just let go without qualms.

 For example, when we were talking about making this trip, Hank said he wanted to stay in an "iconic" hotel. I pictured in my mind the Beverly Hills Hotel or Chateau Marmont, with their five-hundred-dollars a night rooms, and was so relieved when he said he'd reserved a room in the Beverly Hilton, at less than half that imaginary (though very conservative) rate. In fact, I think I'm using Hank's excited desire to do things like this to conceal my own desires in the same regard: I, too, want to have a spare-no-expense guy's weekend in the Big City, but I don't want to say it out loud. 

downtown LA from our balcony

 So: Thursday. Long day. Fun. But since I've already brought up the hotel, let me start by describing that. It is, as Hank particularly wanted, an iconic hotel. Built in 1955 and often updated, it's had glamourous associations with the film and television industry for its whole existence. It is a nice place, though as often happens with upscale things, there's a certain amount of self-doubting silliness mixed in with its confident display of luxury and comfort. The room isn't large; I have to walk sideways to get into bed. But it is very comfortable and quiet. The best feature is the balcony, where I began writing this. It stretches the full width of the room, with space enough for maybe twenty people to watch a Mardi Gras parade, if one could be induced to pass by. The entire outer wall of the room is double paned glass, in four panels, two of which are huge sliding doors. The double-paned part is important, because another building is going up next door. At the moment, I can see 11 heavy construction machines of the sort my niece gets excited about hard at work destroying whatever was in that space before; but if I go inside, I can barely hear anything.

 The bathroom is relatively large; so large, and so lacking in certain amenities, that when I took a shower I had to lay my towel on the edge of the tub, between the two parts of the shower curtain, because there are not enough hooks and towel bars in the room, and none within reach of the tub, but waaaay over there on the far wall, which let's call Thule. When I pushed the curtain back after my shower, it nearly took the towel with it, into the tub. Not good. There's also a bidet handle attached to the toilet, so this will be my chance to figure out how that works, maybe, though I've never seen one like the one here. Just thinking about it puts me in mind of the Clampett family. And in fact, having looked it over more closely and considered the unlikelihood of my being able to levitate in a seated position over the toilet bowl, along with the effect of gravity on water should I stand to use it, I'm not at all sure that it is meant to be used by normal humans. 

 Now, circling back and progressing in a more orderly chronological style, let me tell you about our first day in LA. 

 I found my cheap Lawndale motel a lot less comfortable in every way than the Beverly Hilton, but wasn't dissatisfied with it. I left there early enough to get breakfast -- oatmeal and fresh fruit at a local chain called the Loaded Cafe -- and get to the airport on a schedule I'd constructed without considering the fickleness of Google Maps. It got me to the vicinity of the airport and then told me "Take the ramp on the right." There were three ramps. I managed to control my anxiety level and selected the second ramp, which I thought looked the likeliest; it turned out to be the wrong one. The Google Maps lady said "Turn left," but there was too much traffic in the intervening two lanes to make a left turn forty feet ahead. Eventually, after she rerouted me five or six times, I pulled up to the cellphone waiting lot. Hank called and said he was at Terminal 7; Google Maps said Terminal 7 was either in Chicago or New York, and after some back and forth during which Hank described the signage around him, I went to the arrivals area and found him. I'll gloss over the trivial intervening anxiety-laden moments in between his call and his collection. Suffice it to say we stayed in phone contact until we actually laid eyes on each other, and described a lot of the physical features of LAX to each other.

 I topped off the gas tank at the first station we came to and we went off to start our Guys' Weekend in the Big City. Don't get any dirty ideas; neither of us is that sort of guy. I might've been so inclined when I was younger (much younger), but if Hank has the slightest inclination in that direction I'd be very surprised. Probably only his priest knows for sure, but I'm betting a second cocktail at the office Christmas party is about as wild as Hank ever gets. We may have different motivations -- I'm old and tired, he's content within his own skin I think -- but it comes to the same thing. 

Point Vicente lighthouse

 We drove all the way down the Palos Verdes Peninsula to Point Vicente Lighthouse, where we could look out across the channel to the offshore islands. The houses, the landscaping, the roads: it was all beautiful. Neither of us had seen it before. We watched the pounding surf and waited for the cliffs along the shore to crumble into the sea, but nothing happened for a while so we got back in the car and drove around to the harbor, where I got a quick shot of the USS Iowa (and now I've seen all four the the Iowa-class battleships from World War II, so there's that off my bucket list. My bucket list is a dull thing.) before going across two high new Harbor Bridges toward the Queen Mary. (I'll skip over the confusion caused by GMaps' vague instructions.)

 The Queen Mary was our real destination for the day. As boys, both Hank and I were fascinated by ocean liners, the huge ships that even then were all but extinct, the stegosaurs of transatlantic transportation. I had worked out my boyish giddiness at seeing this ship twenty-five years ago, on my first visit; Hank got his out of the way on this occasion. We spent a pretty good stretch of time on board, including a very nice lunch in the Promenade Cafe. Late in our visit my knee suddenly started hurting, something that hasn't happened in quite a while, despite the walking and hiking I've been putting it through the last few weeks. Not the grinding pain of my arthritis (though I haven't felt that either) but the sharp unpredictable pain of having turned it somehow. It came and went for an hour or two and hasn't recurred since, but it was enough to get me to go wait at the car while Hank checked out the engine room at the tail-end of our visit.

 After that, we drove up to Beverly Hills and checked into our hotel.

 Hank insisted on taking an Uber to the restaurant because of the traffic (40 minutes to go six miles) and his concern about being able to park there. I wanted to argue: it was too expensive a ride, I like to drive, we could see more in the Jag than in an Uber. But because my crystal ball has a big crack in it, I didn't try the two arguments that might have won the point: that I knew more about the landmarks along the way than our LA-native Uber driver, and that if we had our own car there, it wouldn't take us more than an hour just to get a ride back to the hotel in the middle of the night. Well, who knew.

 Dinner was at Musso & Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard, now the oldest restaurant in the city, and one where somewhat-famous people might be spotted in the wild. (They also haven't changed their menu since 1915, so it may now be the only place in town where you can still get calf brains and lamb kidneys.) I'm pretty certain I saw the guy who played Tim Allen's mentor and business partner on Last Man Standing, but I don't remember his name. And the guy across the aisle from us looked more and more familiar as the evening went on, but again, I don't know his name. He just looked like somebody I'd seen on TV.

 (A little later, Nicole Kidman arrived at the Egyptian Theater for a movie premiere, and I got a picture, but I can't see her in it. Still, you know, it was a little exciting. Or it would have been if we'd known she was in the movie, but we didn't know a thing about it. I only took the photo from across the street because people screeched when she got there; I didn't know who they were screeching at; I thought I heard someone call out the name "Kelly.")

 We continued to haemorrhage cash by buying tickets to see a movie in the iconic Grauman's Chinese Theater's main auditorium. It turned out to be a preview of an animated movie that opened the next day, Inside Out 2. Hank and I took turns waking each other up. But it's a beautiful theater, and he gets to cross one more thing off his bucket list. (I also bought a souvenir sweatshirt because, you know, it gets cold in LA when the sun goes down. And I tried to buy tickets to a Fringe Festival stage play on Saturday, but it appears I set up a profile on their web site in 2016, and now I don't know the password.)

 The evening finally came to an end after a shockingly expensive drink at the Library Bar in the Roosevelt Hotel (the iconic Roosevelt Hotel; that's important to my shredded sense of value, which I hope will not be so further strained on this trip). Hank's phone battery had died, and apparently you now have to have the app to get an Uber. The bartender didn't have a charger for his phone, so I said we could just get the hotel to call us a taxi. Turns out not to be that simple anymore, now that everybody's got technology to screw things up.

 Over the course of the last hour and a half of our evening, the valets at the Roosevelt arranged for our transportation, God bless 'em all, with four cab companies. Two never showed up. One showed up, at the other end of the building despite clear instructions, and left because we weren't there. The head valet also had one of his guys go out onto Hollywood Boulevard and flag down a cab in the old fashioned way, but that guy never found his way around the corner to the valet entrance, where we were waiting. Well, eventually one of the cab companies came through and the ride back to the hotel went off without a hitch after that. (And it only cost about half what the Uber ride had cost.)

LA Trip reprise: Havasu Sentence & Escape to LA!

 Monday & Tuesday

 It hit 122 degrees Tuesday afternoon at the house in Havasu. I think that pretty much says it all. Don't you tell me it's a dry heat.

 The highlights of my time in Havasu are as follows: early morning walks around Carly's Island, followed by breakfast at Peggy's Sunrise Cafe, my favourite place in the city; really the only place I've found for a decent breakfast. And I got an oil change in the Jag. I thought when I left home that I could just do it when I got back, but it was already 1400 miles past-due, and I wasn't even to LA yet. So what the hell. And I learned that, if you're looking for a solid career with growth potential, you should open a drive-through oil-change shop in Lake Havasu City. The first shop I called had an opening for a week from Friday. The second could get me in on Monday. Third time was the charm, but it cost me more than twice what it would have back home.

 I decided not to return to Havasu after LA; I wouldn't be able to get there before 10PM or so, and then all I'd do is wake up and shut up the house before heading home. No point, really: it wasn't worth the savings of one extra night in a motel, especially when you consider the added gas to get there, at $5.59 a gallon (for premium).

 So I made a reservation for that first night of the return trip, in Blythe, California. I also made a reservation for Wednesday night at a motel in a suburb called Lawndale, not far from LAX, so it'd be easy to get there to collect the Hankmeister when he got in. Then I checked my route across the Mojave Desert, and went to bed. 

 And finally, I've had three more people compliment the car since I got to Havasu. That alone is worth the extra expense.Well, maybe not, but it doesn't hurt.

 Wednesday, June 12

 I managed to shut the house up pretty quickly; really the only time-consuming part was making the bed. It's so low to the ground that it's difficult to get down there and tuck the sheets in. I was on the road by 6:30, I think. Stopped for coffee at the Running Man C-store in Parker, then crossed into California. My first stop was a small monument on the side of the road to mark one of the desert training bases used during World War II. On the way there a white lizard at least a foot long ran across the road in front of me. I'm not sure if it was an albino or if there's a species of lizard in the Mojave that's actually bright white. But I know it was more than a foot long because it was on both sides of the double yellow stripe in the road at the same time.

 After that I tried to find a place called the Desert Castle, a private home of unusual architecture, but after a dozen turns, alternating right and left, I was faced with nothing but dirt roads. I was hungry by then, so I blew it off and went for a restaurant in Joshua Tree -- the town, not the park. 

 OMG I had the best breakfast I've ever had between San Antonio and Los Angeles! At a place called JT Country Kitchen, I got excellent coffee, three huge Oatmeal Raisin Cookie Pancakes (the special of the day) and a side of perfectly cooked bacon. I'm sure I gained weight just from the aroma. Then back on the road. I decided to top off the gas tank, so I asked Google Maps for a place, selected one, and set off to find it. GMaps took me down the highway heading west for about four miles, then directed me to make a U-turn. Huh? Okay.... Went back east on the highway and found the gas station, next door to the restuarant where I'd had breakfast. 

 Technology.

 So my next stop was at a place called the Devil's Punchbowl. I followed GMaps west until it took me up into the mountains north of the city. Sixteen miles uphill behind a slow truck. Then GMaps directed me to make a U-turn and directed me sixteen miles back the way I'd come. I kid you not.

 As I said: technology. 

 The road I pointlessly went up into the mountains on is one that passes by a cement plant. That cement plant was built by the Los Angeles Metropolitan Water Authority in the 1920s in order to provide concrete for the construction of the famous aqueducts planned by William Mulholland (of Mulholland Drive fame) for the theft of all the water in the Central Valley of California. It's a famous episode replete with corruption and self-dealing, and as it happens I was listening to an audiobook about that very subject the last time I passed that way, on the Stained Glass Trip a few years ago.

 This trip, I'm listening to podcasts (because I'm out of audiobooks). I've been listening to Empire, a series Sherry got us started with on our Condo Trip last month. I've finished all the episodes about India and Pakistan and am now mostly done with the Ottoman Empire. The podcast is presented by two very accomplished historians: a Punjabi woman named Anita something who lives in London and an Englishman named William (his last name is either Drimple or deRimple or Dalrymple, depending on what day it is, I guess) who lives in India and seems to be related to everybody who ever did anything imperial in British history. Anita wants us to believe she's shocked -- shocked, I say -- by all the nonstandard sex around the world, but she can't help raising the question every time there's an opening. And there's always an opening. They both have posh-sounding English accents that are very easy to understand; most of their guest presenters are easy to understand, too, except for one guy who is an authority on Gandhi. He's either Indian or Pakistani, I believe, and it sounded like he was standing in a cave and chewing on licorice while speaking in a heavy South Asian accent. I gave up on that episode.

 But most of the time it's a hoot, listening to erudite scholars talk so enthusiastically about things that I, at best, knew only a bare minimum about. Most of what they discuss, I had no idea about before, so it's fascinating stuff. (I also listened to five episodes out of order about the United States' founding fathers. I did not find those five episodes as interesting, partly because I already knew most of it better than the two of them seemed to, and partly because they seemed to want to focus entirely on sex and slavery, especially where those two subjects intersect.) Anyway, I heartily recommend the podcast series to anyone who's interested in history other than US history.

The Devil's Punchbowl

 I finally reached the Los Angeles County Park called the Devil's Punchbowl. It features an interesting sandstone outcropping lying in a small valley. I started to walk down but I didn't relish the prospect of walking back up in the heat, so I just took some pictures and went to the park office, where they have specimens of some of the local fauna and flora. Nearby is a small altar or a big bench built of rocks, and on the side of it there are two round light-coloured stones. Each one had a bronze lizard on it. At first I thought they were actually bronze lizard statues placed there for decoration, but when I shook my phone to turn on the camera they both took off. I managed to get a picture of one.

 From there I went to check out two musical roads. 

 Here's the story, as I understand it from several sources: Some years ago, Honda wanted to do a car commercial wherein their car drives along and the road noise plays a familiar tune. They hired somebody to cut grooves in a public road in Lancaster, California, and shot their commercial. They left the grooved road behind. It attracted people from all over, excited to drive down this road in a residential area of town and listen to the 30 seconds of familiar music. People who lived there got pissed at all the traffic zipping up and down their road, so the city paved over it. Then other people started complaining because they wanted the experience. So the city contacted somebody who'd been involved in setting up the original musical road for instructions, and hired somebody to put it back in, but in a more remote area of the same road -- way out on the way to the little-used airport.

 Sadly, the person cutting the second set of grooves didn't quite understand the instructions, and as a result, the grooves are not quite correctly spaced. Here's what it sounds like now (the music starts at about 19 seconds in; sorry about that):

 So this musical and technical failure so exorcised a local citizen that he decided to show the City of Lancaster how it's done, and he got permission from the neighbouring city of Palmdale to cut grooves into one of their roadways (though he only did a narrow strip along the road edge; much cheaper that way). It sounds like this (I missed the first few notes, but the music starts at about 8 seconds):

 So there.

 My last stop before braving the permanent rush-hour traffic of Los Angeles was Vasquez Rocks, a famous film shooting site. In the visitor's center there were posters for a number of films that had been shot out there, but I was only interested in the spot used in the Star Trek original-series episode called "Arena," where a busybody race called the Metrons force Captain Kirk to fight the unnamed captain of the Gorn spaceship that the Enterprise has been pursuing through Metron space. It was also the site where Sheldon, Leonard, Raj and Howard were humiliated in The Big Bang Theory while photographing themselves in Star Trek costumes. 

 Turns out the two episodes were shot at a place called The Famous Rocks. How apt.

The Famous Vasquez Rocks

 I drove into LA from there, top down. As I crested the mountain by the Getty Center on Interstate 5 I was hit by a wave of cool air. I just that moment, the outside temperature dropped from about 90 to 75. Sweet.

 So now I'm settled into an inexpensive motel in Lawndale, ready to head out to LAX in the morning.