Road Trip Day #8 - Los Angeles

DAY 8 - Saturday, October 25, 2008

Wahhh! The last day of our trip! Nooooooooooo. I really didn't want it to end... we had such an amazing time! I'm so glad we did it.

Saturday morning, we met Brian for brunch at a really cute restaurant named Alcove. The majority of the restaurant's seating is on outdoor patios... something else that would never survive in Cleveland. I love eating outside. I wish more places in Cleveland offered it... well, and that the weather would cooperate more often. Anyhow, the atmosphere at Alcove was really nice and the food was great too. Mmm.

Oh, here's a pic coming down the mountain from Shea's dad's house:
After brunch, Brian took us on a tour of Hollywood. He drove us around and then we stopped and to explore the area. We walked around the area near the Kodak Theatre (where the Academy Award ceremonies are held... and is pretty much in a mall- who knew?). We ran into a group of people filming what looked to be a pretty crappy zombie movie. It was kind of annoying, honestly. Here we were just trying to do some normal every-day sight-seeing, and there's all these zombies limping around and blocking walkways. Argh. I should have taken a picture of the zombies... darnit. Instead, I did the more touristy thing and took a picture of this:
Saw this too... but we weren't able to go to any shows while we were out there.
We spent some time looking at all the hand and footprints outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre.
I loved looking at all these. I'm so glad we stopped. Here are a few of my favorites:
Judy Garland had some impossibly small feet.
Ahh! And then I saw Master Chief! Turns out he wears UnderArmour.
Master Chief's outfit was actually made out of cardboard, but he did a damn good job. As I admired his choice to wield the energy sword, I realized how it's probably the only Halo weapon you could get away with carrying in public. I'm pretty sure he'd be quickly removed by the police if he tried walking around Hollywood with a rocket launcher on his shoulder.

After Hollywood, Shea, Michelle, and I went to the beach. I think we ended up somewhere between Venice and Santa Monica.
The beach was beautiful. The water was too cold for swimming, but we layed out.
The seagulls out there were INTENSE. They mutilated a bag of leftovers that some people temporarily left by their stuff while they walked around. It was fun to watch. Every time I see ocean seagulls (oceangulls?), I'm always amazed by how much larger they are than Lake Erie seagulls (lakegulls?).
At the beach, a bee stung me on my right ring finger! Argh. I had only been stung by a bee once before, on a family vacation to Disney World in 1996. So I definitely forgot how much it hurts! My finger swelled up pretty big and it took over a week to go down. Interestingly, now, almost a month later, I can still see a red spot on my finger where I got stung and sometimes it itches or hurts. Weird. I hope that's okay?

Later that night, we went to Cory's Halloween party!!!!!
Here are some random pictures of us from the party... Aren't our shirts cute?!
We had SO much fun and everyone we met was so nice. A lot of people referred to us collectively as "Ohio". As in, "Hey Ohio, come over here!" haha.
This Transformers helmet was sitting on a table... and we just had to try it on...
After a great time at the party, we crashed at Brian's apartment because he lives closer to the airport than Shea's Dad. Sunday morning, we woke up early and Shea and Brian dropped off me and Michelle at LAX.

I was so sad our trip had come to an end. I'm glad we were rushed at the airport drop-off because given any more time, I would have been bawling. It's so hard to put the way I feel about our journey into words without sounding cliche... it's indescribable. I'll just leave at that... but hopefully these posts gave some insight!

Road Trip Day #7 - Los Angeles

DAY 7 - Friday, October 24, 2008

I was woken Friday morning by the loud incessant squawking of birds outside. After accepting that I wasn't going to be able to fall asleep again with all that racket, I left the bedroom and found Shea in the kitchen. She led me outside to show me the source of the noise... wild GREEN PARROTS! I'm lucky if I see a cardinal or blue jay back in Cleveland, so to see a huge flock of 20+ brightly colored birds was so cool!

Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures and we only saw the parrots that morning. But I found a website for "The California Parrot Project" that has a bunch of good pictures and explains the 13 different parrot species found in California. So, what we saw looked like this:
You should check out that parrot site, it's pretty interesting!

We ate breakfast and then Shea's dad took us on a little tour of Altadena and Pasadena. In Pasadena, there was an art installation where people could write wishes on little notes and hang them from trees. Later, the wishes will be combined with others from all over the world and placed near Yoko Ono's Imagine Peace Tower off the coast of Reykjavik, Iceland. It is dedicated to the memory of John Lennon.
While walking around and reading the notes (which I could have done all day long btw), I realized how odd it is that in Pasadena, they can just leave all that paper outside for months and never worry about it raining and ruining them. Back in Ohio, those notes wouldn't last a week.

We had lunch at Le Pain Quotidien... this was my yummy beautiful Gruyère tartine:
We stopped back at Shea's dad's place for a bit and then met Brian at his apartment.
Brian lives really close to the See's Candy factory where the famous "I Love Lucy" episode (with the conveyor belt... you know the one!) was filmed.
Brian gave us a tour of Beverly Hills, UCLA, and Santa Monica.
Brian said that this is the gate to the Playboy Mansion! We couldn't see anything at all though because all the hedges in the area are SO high.
In Santa Monica, we walked on the beach... it was beautiful outside but the water was really cold.
Walked on the pier...
Walked through the park on our way to the Third Street Promenade...
Cool dinosaur topiary-type fountain things along the Promenade...
Dinner at George's Bistro...
I had seafood ravioli... mmm!
After dinner, we found the perfect shirts at Zara for Cory's Halloween party the next night. His party was going to be Wizard of Oz themed and we had no idea what we were going to wear since we neglected to pack costumes in our luggage. But we miraculously happened upon these really cute Wizard of Oz shirts at Zara and each bought a different one! Yay!

We ended the night hanging out back at Brian's apartment. Our college friend Andy, who also lives in LA now, and his three friends who went to John Carroll too and were in town visiting Andy joined us at Brian's. Cory came over too. We all talked for a couple hours, then left, and went to bed. Our vacation was coming to an end... only one more day in California. :(

Road Trip Day #6 - Las Vegas to Los Angeles, CA

DAY 6 - Thursday, October 23, 2008

Our last day on the road!

View from our hotel room Thursday morning:
Unfortunately, we weren't able to swim in the pool. Maybe next time. :)

Shea, ready to leave:
After checking out of the hotel and loading the car, we walked down the Strip a little more. We walked through Harrah's and went back to The Forum Shops to experience the spiral escalator that Tara had told us so much about. It was really cool.
I seriously lost sleep trying to figure out how this thing works. I knew that escalators recycle their stairs, so to speak, but for some reason, it wasn't making sense to me on a curve. I kept thinking that once the stairs rolled over, they'd be curving in the opposite direction and couldn't possibly be going down the same curve underneath the "active" stairs. But after awhile, it started making more sense. Googling the topic revealed even more complexities that I hadn't even thought of... like the fact that the outside of the steps needs to move faster than the inside of the steps... and the inside/outside handrails move at different rates too. Wow. Here are some links if you're curious now too:

• Spiral Escalators Debut in Las Vegas
• Mitsubishi Electric: Spiral Escalators

More casino pics:
We had lunch at this fancy-looking Chipotle on the Strip. Yeah yeah, we came all the way to Vegas and had Chipotle. So what? We had a craving.
Then we hopped in the car for the FINAL leg of our journey. I drove the entire way from Las Vegas to LA (a little over 4 hours). It wasn't a bad drive at all... just borrrrrring.

We were so excited that we were getting close to our destination, that we got a little giddy and had an impromptu dance party to David Bisbal's "Ave Maria". Sleepy Michelle missed out on the fun.
Can I buy a vowel, please?
According to Wikipedia, some crazy dude named Curtis Howe Springer named this area Zzyzx in 1944, saying it was the last word in the English language. He completely made up the word and its pronunciation (zei-zix), so it's interesting that he could just throw some random letters together and declare it a word in the English language. What's even more surprising is that it worked.

Have you heard of this guy before? This is great... I guess Springer was a self-proclaimed physician and Methodist minister, but in reality, was neither. He was a radio evangelist though. People would send him money for hair loss cures, cancer cures, etc. and in return, the "medicine" he'd send them was basically vegetable juice. In Zzyzx, Springer built a hotel, church, spa, radio studio, a random castle, and an airstrip he called "Zyport". Haha. I love it.

In the end, turns out the Zzyzx land never even belonged to Springer in the first place and in 1974, he was found guilty of squatting on federal land AND making false claims about his products.

Insane.

So, like I said, the drive from Vegas to LA was pretty boring. Lots of desert. We went through Arizona for a little bit! It was even more deserty and boring. And there was construction the whole way through Arizona so that was no fun. Once we got to LA, though, there was lots of traffic! I thought it was fun to drive in LA, but I don't think I'd want to do it every day.

We made it to Shea's dad's house in Altadena around 4:00pm. We talked with Shea's dad and snacked and moved all of Shea's belongings from the car into the house. Then we showered, got ready, cooked dinner with Shea's dad, and chatted more.

Our friend Brian was not even remotely aware that Michelle was with us. He had no idea that she was part of the 40-hour cross-country drive. It was our gigantic surprise.

Brian and his boyfriend Cory were coming over for dinner that night but got stuck in a wildfire-related traffic jam for what seemed like forever. This really drove up our anticipation but also gave us more time to devise our plan.

One of my favorite memories of Brian is him, at a John Carroll SUPB (Student Union Programming Board) summer retreat, when we had to present posters about ourselves. Everyone's was pretty typical... pictures of family, friends, and themselves as little kids, magazine cut-outs of favorite foods and music groups, and lists of hobbies. But Brian took a completely different approach, "I separated my poster into four categories: likes, dislikes, pet peeves, and phobias."

I'm not sure whether "closed shower curtains" fell under pet peeves or phobias, but that's when I learned that he does not like them. And with this knowledge, our plan emerged.

So, Brian and Cory finally arrived and after Shea and I said our excited hello's and suffocated Brian with hugs (we hadn't seen him in over a year), Shea offered to give a tour of her dad's house before dinner. The living room, the kitchen, the TV room, the bedrooms... the... bathroom.

We were planning on staying in there for an uncomfortably long time, but all we had to do was comment on the cool glass sink, and Brian was already noticing the green shower tile next to the closed curtain. He pulled the shower curtain back a little bit to admire it, which caused Shea and I to start laughing and Michelle even let out a little squeak from behind the curtain. Of course, this prompted Brian to pull the curtain back further and reveal... Michelle!

Our surprise was a great success and Brian said he was very impressed that we kept such a huge secret form him. It was so nice for the four of us to finally be reunited again!

Me, Michelle, Cory, Brian, and Shea right after the surprise:

We ate dinner with Shea's dad and then talked and talked and talked even after Shea's dad turned in for the night. It was so great to catch up, to rehash old memories, and to just be silly. Many memories and bottles of wine later, it was time for bed. What a fun day. :)