California Vacation - Day 02 (Exploring Los Angeles)

 

What's that old song that Nat King Cole sang so well?  In the past 8 months, I've been to the two ends of the "Mother Road", historic Route 66.  From Chicago to LA, more than 2,000 miles all the way.  But I didn't drive it.  I flew....

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This morning, I woke up on a New York City, and not a Los Angeles rhythm.  By my watch, it was 7 am New York Time.  But it was 4 am Los Angeles time.  So, I turned my TV on to watch the talkings heads discuss the upcoming Trump trial of the week, and just as things things were getting interesting - POOF!  The TV was on, but no signal was coming to the TV.  I figured that I might try turning it off and on, but this only made things worse - the TV would not come back on.  (Reminds me of the Cable Box issue I'll be dealing with the day after I get home.)  So I called the main desk and asked them to look at things while I was out for the day.

So, with no fixed plans for the day, I decided to take the bus to the Santa Monica pier and walk around.  If I had gotten there two hours later, things would have been perfect.  But most of the places wouldn't start opening up until 10 am Pacific time, and my body was acting like it was 1 pm Eastern.  This meant that the crowds hadn't yet arrived, and I could see the place without the crowds.

Unfortunately, the pier's carousel wasn't open for business, so I had to get this shot through the windows, rather than from the inside.  At least, I was there about 20 years ago, and the place looks as classic as it did back then.

I saw a couple feeding money into this machine and gave them some advice: Do NOT under any circumstances wish to be BIG.  This machine has a weird sense of humor, as I remember that it granted a child this wish in 1988 and all hell broke loose in his life.  Luckily, he was able to wish himself small again, and there his story ended.

Sadly, as I was walking to the Santa Monica Metro station, I saw one of the many homeless people taking up space on a sidewalk when they should be sheltered in a safe and clean space.  If you look closely enough, you see a man laying on the sidewalk - one homeless person among many that I saw near the beach. Too bad that this problem is nationwide - these people need help, and it's not being provided to them.

Now, I must interrupt the flow of this narrative to mention that I attempted to use LA's "Tap Card" app on my phone, and it worked less often than it didn't.  After having breakfast at Starbucks, I asked one of the hotel staff where I could catch the bus to Santa Monica - and he gave me the wrong bus stop location.  (LA is a suburb in search of a city, and like most people in suburbia, this person was clueless in regard to mass transit.)  Thankfully, both Google Maps and the Transit app gave me better information - I still had to walk an extra two blocks to find the bus stop - which wasn't marked well.  This is when I tried to use the Tap app - and it didn't work.  Instead of holding up the bus (as would happen in NYC) until the fare was paid, the driver told me to take a seat and not worry about it.

When I left Santa Monica, I walked to the Metro station, and voila! - the Tap app worked!  Either something I did was wrong, there was an incompatibility between my phone and the scanner, or there were a lot of bad scanners in the field.  Later on, I only had one successful use of the Tap app (with some help from a Metro system employee), with two F-it's by me and a bus driver.  Next time I visit LA, I'll buy a Tap card instead of using the app, as this is more likely to work properly.  Out of the five times I tried to use the Tap app, it worked for me only once, leaving $13.25 in my account.

After Santa Monica, I decided to go to Downtown LA and visit Union Station and the Olvera Street shopping district.  The last time I was in this area of LA, I was with Ex-GF-M, and she didn't want to go to this section of town because she felt unsafe.  (Ex-GF-M didn't feel safe unless she was in a predominantly Anglo neighborhood, and being surrounded by Mexicans must have frightened her enough to say No.)  This time, I didn't have to deal with her nonsense, and I had a nice time walking through this district and having lunch there.

While there, I stopped to visit the Avila Adobe, a free museum which shows what the oldest house in Los Angeles must have looked like,  For the most part, it reminded me of a larger place in Old Town San Diego.  Hopefully, I'll be able to get here again with RQS, as I think she'd like to have seen in person where I went today,.

All too soon, it was time to leave.  I wanted to get back to the hotel by 3 pm, as I was getting tired.  Instead of going back via Santa Monica (as I might do on another trip), I took the tram heading to Long Beach, with the idea of transferring to the tram heading to the airport.  This is not a trip to do at night, as one passes by a few industrial areas before going through Watts (you can see the towers from the tram), then transferring for another tram at the Rosa Parks Boulevard stop.  Although I felt safe (it was daytime), I don't recommend doing this at night.  Once I got to the Airport station (which is not in the airport), I had to take another bus to get to my hotel.

Arriving at the hotel, I found that my TV still wasn't working.  AARGH!  At least, after 30 minutes of fiddling with the equipment behind the TV, I had TV again, and I could consider stripping for the evening,

Traveling to DC

 

This weekend, RQS and I went down to Washington, DC for a little R&R.  We've been looking to get away for a while, and I took the week off without pay in order to do so.  Today's entry is not going to be a full recap of the trip.  Instead, it is more of an overview of what we did during this trip.

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One of the things RQS and I felt that we needed to know was whether we could go away for a mini vacation (with opportunities to escape each other if needed) and find out whether we could get along after several days together.  On that issue, I can say that we have dealt with a couple of mini crises, and we have passed a couple of tests in dealing with unexpected adversity.

We left for DC on a Saturday, and used a Lyft to get to Penn Station (NYP) from RQS's house.  The driver asked if it was OK not to use the most direct route through Manhattan to reach NYP, as there was a parade going on that day (which he was going to attend).  We said OK, and did the loop from the Brooklyn bridge to South Ferry, then back uptown on the West side, where he dropped us off across from the new Moynihan train hall.  This wasn't a problem, as we had time to spare.  But we almost blew it, as RQS misread the departure time.  Luckily, I noticed the error, and we made it across the street with over 30 minutes to spare/

One of the problems that was going to bother me throughout the trip would be my lack of low denomination folding money.  I had several $100 bills on me, but was running out of $20's.  So our lost time in NYC was due to my looking for a Chase branch before getting on the train.  This forced me to do something which became an advantage for me - use a specific credit card for all my purchases on the trip.  This made it much easier to figure out how much I was spending on the trip, and balance things out with RQS at the end of the trip.  But I digress.

RQS and I waited in the train hall for an announcement to tell us that it was time to board our train.  While waiting to get on the elevator, we met another couple traveling to DC and I overheard a comment about New York City rudeness.  I said that in NYC, if a person uses deleted expletives for 5 minutes then says "have a nice day", you know that the person likes you.  Then, I mentioned that the F-Word is not an expletive in NYC, but only a word used for dramatic emphasis.  They laughed at this while we got on the escalator taking us down to the platform.

Boarding the train was not an issue, and we saw a homeless woman riding between the train cars.  The steward chatted with this lady, and then she proceeded to lock herself in the lavatory for most of the ride.  About 2 hours lady, the attendant (and a female assistant) did their best to politely tell the woman that she had to leave the lavatory before the train reached DC.  When she finally vacated the room, she used words to define herself that showed how down and out she was.  As much as I felt sorry for her, I was impressed at how well the two Amtrak employees dealt with an issue which could have escalated into something worse.

As we arrived in DC, we noticed that the temperature was much warmer than it was in New York.  Instead of a long sleeve shirt and a windbreaker, it was time to break out a short sleeve shirt.  Yet, after checking in to our hotel, we stayed in what we were wearing for a nice dinner with RQS's cousin before calling it a night.