March 24 to March 27, 2017—SoCal
My brother’s daughter lives in LA, in Culver City, and that was reason enough for us to visit the City of Angels. Booked at an RV camp in Long Beach which I expected to be a noisy, chaotic place but was actually quite pleasant, backing up to a little wetland near the port facilities.
We got together with Caitlin in Long Beach for dinner and sitting around the campsite; very nice time with a sweet kid. Brenda and I drove, sans trailer, the thirty miles to downtown LA (ninety minute trip) and signed on for one of those hop-on hop-off bus tours. It was just what I wanted—exposure to various neighborhoods and sights of the city. Next time someone says Beverly Hills, Rodeo Drive, Sunset Strip, Paramount Studios, Hollywood Hills, Chateau Marmont, Grauman’s etc., I’ll have an accurate picture in mind, not some mental image from Beverly Hillbillies or something. We got off the bus to walk to Little Ethiopia to have a great Ethiopian lunch. The lady who served us was very familiar with the Washington DC Ethiopian restaurant scene
For our second night we hosted the guy we had met at Joshua Tree and his wife at our campsite for Friday evening cocktails. She was born and bred LA and made me laugh with her valley girl imitations. He is retired from teaching at a ritzy private school in LA, she is still enjoying her work in social services for a few more years. interesting to me she had known Tom Lehrer, one of my favorites, a satirist, a writer of comic social/political songs.
In a coincidence our next door neighbor at the RV park was a woman who went to Gallaudet college in the 1960s and taught deaf students at Leonardtown HS in St Marys County in the 1990s. I am sure if we had more time and could have communicated better we would have found friends in common; the connections didn’t come up until we were hooked up a pulling out.
Except for the traffic and the expense I could see why people live in LA, or any other city for that matter.
Found some side-street parking in Venice Beach to check out the show there. It is famous as a haunt of odd-balls, which is saying something in southern California. So we did that for a couple hours, maybe too early in the day for the full weirdo display, then headed to Malibu. Stayed at a decent, expensive (+$50) RV park overlooking the sea. The seaside access all along this coast is blocked by private homes which is irritating. Water access in southern California is as bad as it is in the Chesapeake region; the rich get the shore, the masses cluster in the few remaining public spaces.
Drove a long way north to a county campground at Jalama Beach outside of Lompoc. Here we see what a gem pacific California is—velvety green mountains sloping or rushing to the wild surf. This park is reached by driving 14 miles through verdant mountainous terrain with little signs of habitation, ranches I suspect. Our campsite was way up on a hill overlooking the sea. A half-dozen kite-boarders were furrowing the sea. It was relentlessly windy, but bearable because the scenery was so wild. The scenic Amtrak train passed by about 100 feet from us twice a day. It was so windy we couldn’t hear it. I was surprised to see so many oil drilling platforms off shore.