Day 20: LA Woman

So last night we failed to reach LA because it was just too darn dark, and I was tired of driving. So we stayed in the little town of Victorville, population 110,000. If you're counting, that's probably the third largest city we've stayed in since we left Boston (the largest would be Salt Lake City, population 183,000 or so). (Alex thinks I am cheating on this number since we stayed in suburbs of Minneapolis and Detroit.)

Victorville is a fine place, I'm sure, but our main goal was to get to LA in time to meet up with a couple of friends, Seth, Chelsea and Chelsea's boyfriend, Dan. We got lunch at Home, a restaurant in Los Feliz, where Seth lives. Their menu includes such marvels as Red Velvet Pancakes. Which I ordered. I wasn't smart enough to take a picture of them, but here is a picture of a stack of pancakes, so all you need to do is imagine that they are red:

We had an awesome time, and we learned that everyone at the table likes Arrested Development, but only Chelsea, Alex and I are Buffy fans. (We are working on Seth though. Dan appears to be a committed slayer hater.)

We also discussed various things to do in LA, although I think Seth most perfectly summarized the ideal itinerary in an email the day before:

As for quintessentially LA things to fit in one day, I suggest you get a weed card, get fake tanned, and buy an entire wardrobe of Ed Hardy clothes.  If you don't leave here with a sweater with a rhinestone dragon on it, you have not experienced LA.

Sadly, we fell back to the secondary itinerary, which was to go to The Getty museum (driving to it along Mulholland drive, on Dan's suggestion, was quite fun except for the terrifying part where a car from oncoming traffic came through a blind curve in the middle of the road at about 30mph in a 10mph zone; thankfully, he missed.  Mulholland Drive is narrow and windy, not unlike Needles Highway in South Dakota.  On the one hand, there are no switchbacks or tunnels on Mulholland, although on the other nobody is street parking pink Land Rovers on blind curves on Needles). Here's a picture from Wikipedia that was taken from Mulholland drive. It didn't look quite like this when we drove it:

After reaching the Getty, we discovered that it was about as intimidating as a national park--there's even this special tram you have to take to get to the museum from the parking garage half a mile away--and the museum itself is kind of big.

So we started out with the Getty orientation film, hoping for some guidance. It turns out that the sole purpose of the orientation film appears to be convincing visitors that the Getty is AWESOME. Sample topic: that the Getty promotes art preservation around the world. (Not how they promote it; just that they do.)

After watching the video, I suggested that we could leave, secure in knowing that the Getty was AWESOME, and what more could they want us to take away from the museum?

Instead of leaving, we went to a bizarre photography exhibit titled "Herb Ritts: LA Style", which included an entire section on celebrity photos. We immediately decided that this was a quintessentially LA experience and went through it. Sadly, photographs weren't allowed, so I can't show you any of the photos. Just assume they were great.

Alex was a bit annoyed at the amount of time I spent looking at the fashion photos in the exhibit (which, for the life of me, I couldn't tell were fashion photos), but probably the best was the daguerrotype of some random celebrity that included a quote from the photographer to the effect of, photography hasn't gotten any better since the 1840s. (The daguerrotype is good at detail, not so good at being easy to look at.)

We also spent some time looking at the impressionist art, including these lovely pieces:

Perhaps the best part of the Getty was the cactus garden:

How cool are those little ball cacti?

We also discovered that the Getty museum is coated in travertine:

Do you remember where we saw travertine before? If so, good for you. If not, here's a hint: it's an 11 letter word for the most famous national park in the US.

But that wasn't the only thing it had in common with Yellowstone, as the Getty appears to have some wildlife and geothermal activity:

The geysers below were surprisingly active!

as well as trenchant commentary on the state of open source (ok, Yellowstone didn't have that)

After getting dosed on art, we headed out for San Luis Obispo, where we are staying at the motel owned by the parents of our friend Sam J. We took HW 101 and, sometimes, HW1. The drive, after leaving the rather terrifying LA traffic, was quite beautiful, with lots of lush green trees, palm trees, agricultural elements and more.