I Heart Los Angeles

After Sunday brunch we were left to our own devices again. The Museum of Contemporary Art has two branches. The one in Little Tokyo was closed in preparation for a Hello Kitty convention this week, so we trooped back up Bunker Hill to see the other branch. There was a big Andy Warhol exhibit there. Anne started feeling ill at the museum, so we headed back to the room. She felt worse after a couple of hours, so we canceled our dinner with Lou and Pearl. We really want to see them again, but there was no sense endangering them with disease. Later Dan came by and we walked across the street for some Japanese fusion. Immediately after dinner, Dan left us to attend a sort of comics on comics roast. The next morning, he told us that he had laughed so hard that his face still hurt the morning after.

Anne felt better in the morning and we arranged to see Dan one more time before we left LA. We arranged to meet at a diner that he liked, but when we got there, we found that it was closed on Monday. The next one that we tried was closed too. The third time worked a charm though. After breakfast, we made are farewells. Dan headed off to work and we headed back to the hotel. On the way back, we stopped at The Last Bookstore, an eclectic used bookstore, but aren’t all used bookstores eclectic. We stocked up on bargains. We ended up snaking our way back through the Toy District, which now seems to sell almost everything. For example, we walked along this one city block that was entirely devoted to selling pot paraphernalia. There were dozens of shops there.

We drove north out of LA at high noon. We first got on ‘The 101’, which eventually led us to ‘The 5’ and out of the LA basin. In LA all of the highways are either reverentially referred to with the prefix ‘The’ or cursed with the same prefix. It is all a matter of traffic. Our drive through the San Joaquin Valley was interesting. Everything seems so dry now, what with the drought, but when we got out at a rest stop, it was unexpectedly cool. We passed through the James Dean Memorial Junction without mishap. This is the intersection that he car crashed and died at, while making of the film, Giant. We arrived at my Dad’s house, just in time for dinner.