Road trip, part trois
Oct. 24th, 2005 11:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
veronica_rich"Go west, young man!" Wasn't that Horatio Alger? Or maybe any east coast boss who's fired an annoying employee? Oh well, nevermind.
In October 1999, a friend, Lisa from Wichita, and I drove roughly 1,343,230 light-years to Los Angeles to stay with a mutual friend for a week. Both journalists, we were in pursuit of interviews and sunshine. Well, at least we got plenty of the latter. (Quick fact: For separate reasons, she wanted to interview Ian McKellan and I wanted to interview Liv Tyler - we couldn't, because both had just flown out to New Zealand to work on some indie flick nobody's heard of since. "Lord of the Circles" or some such - I think it played in a few art houses and then fizzled out.)
I suppose there's a lot I could write about this trip. The 32 hours nonstop on the way there, during which neither of us got sleep; the 36 hours back, pretty much ditto on the sleep. But we saw purdy mountains!
And Mojave deserts! Woo!
(And, repeat for 200 or so miles.) There was only one gas station for like 200 miles, and in the late 1999 it was charging nearly $2 a gallon. Now? YOU figure it out.
In other news, I had 5 green apples confiscated by the border guard at the California border, osentsibly because the state has such a thriving fruit industry and does not want to import diseases or bugs riding piggyback on other goods. I think the border guards were just hungry, though. When I said "Missouri green apples" they had to think about it for a good two minutes before deciding, "Uh, no, you can't take those with you. Sorry." (Yeah, right, assholes. Enjoy 'em before they shrivel, courtesy of my mother!)
Finally, we see the end of sand at 100 mph and come to asphalt and everyone else in the free world driving 100 mph.
Me (on phone to Liz, our friend in L.A., somewhere along the Pasadena Parkway outside L.A.): Which exit do we take?
Stacy: *spouts some number, unremembered now*
Me: *repeats to Lisa, who is driving*
Lisa (after 10 more miles): I'm not seeing it.
Me (back on phone): I think you gave us the wrong exit number.
Stacy: No, trust me, it's there.
Me (remember, 32 hours no sleep): NO, OMG, THAT EXIT DOESN'T EXIST, YOU'RE DELUDED!
Lisa: Um ... was that it?
Me: Where?
Lisa: About 200 feet back there.
Me: X.X
Actually, once you've driven around Los Angeles for a couple of days, it's not so bad. You look for landmarks. A LOT. Like Beverly Hills, represented below by perhaps the worst photo to ever exist of the place, for sheer boring-ness.
I got a few good photos out of the place, though. Like Los Angeles valley from Mulholland Drive (no, that's not Julia Roberts in the foreground, it's Lisa):
Or the view of the Pacific coast just a bit south of Santa Barbara, toward Pismo Beach (there's a Bugs Bunny joke somewhere in there):
Or maybe even John Lithgow at a red-carpet event at the Dorothy Parker Pavillion, where they used to hold the Oscar ceremonies. We went to a Los Angeles Symphony reading of "Midsummer's Night Dream" and ran into a boatload of celebrities up-close and personal. (You do NOT realize how tiny and thin Portia de Rossi is in real life, geez. Or how wildly unkempt David E. Kelley looks.)
(John's sort of in the distance in the center, there. Yeah, the riffraff had to keep back.)
And one of the last things I saw was Stacy's ferret, Tribble. Ferrets are illegal in California. But you'll never get Stacy's address out of ME.
And then it was out of there and back toward home ... after an earthquake, of course (7.3, only 100 miles from downtown L.A. - maybe you saw on the news the Amtrak train derailed in the Mojave Desert? Yeah, we drove by it), then eons of desert, then a blizzard in New Mexico at freakin' MIDNIGHT that lasted for eight inches. DID I MENTION IT WAS FUCKING NEW MEXICO?
And, I can't wait to do it again!
In October 1999, a friend, Lisa from Wichita, and I drove roughly 1,343,230 light-years to Los Angeles to stay with a mutual friend for a week. Both journalists, we were in pursuit of interviews and sunshine. Well, at least we got plenty of the latter. (Quick fact: For separate reasons, she wanted to interview Ian McKellan and I wanted to interview Liv Tyler - we couldn't, because both had just flown out to New Zealand to work on some indie flick nobody's heard of since. "Lord of the Circles" or some such - I think it played in a few art houses and then fizzled out.)
I suppose there's a lot I could write about this trip. The 32 hours nonstop on the way there, during which neither of us got sleep; the 36 hours back, pretty much ditto on the sleep. But we saw purdy mountains!
And Mojave deserts! Woo!
(And, repeat for 200 or so miles.) There was only one gas station for like 200 miles, and in the late 1999 it was charging nearly $2 a gallon. Now? YOU figure it out.
In other news, I had 5 green apples confiscated by the border guard at the California border, osentsibly because the state has such a thriving fruit industry and does not want to import diseases or bugs riding piggyback on other goods. I think the border guards were just hungry, though. When I said "Missouri green apples" they had to think about it for a good two minutes before deciding, "Uh, no, you can't take those with you. Sorry." (Yeah, right, assholes. Enjoy 'em before they shrivel, courtesy of my mother!)
Finally, we see the end of sand at 100 mph and come to asphalt and everyone else in the free world driving 100 mph.
Me (on phone to Liz, our friend in L.A., somewhere along the Pasadena Parkway outside L.A.): Which exit do we take?
Stacy: *spouts some number, unremembered now*
Me: *repeats to Lisa, who is driving*
Lisa (after 10 more miles): I'm not seeing it.
Me (back on phone): I think you gave us the wrong exit number.
Stacy: No, trust me, it's there.
Me (remember, 32 hours no sleep): NO, OMG, THAT EXIT DOESN'T EXIST, YOU'RE DELUDED!
Lisa: Um ... was that it?
Me: Where?
Lisa: About 200 feet back there.
Me: X.X
Actually, once you've driven around Los Angeles for a couple of days, it's not so bad. You look for landmarks. A LOT. Like Beverly Hills, represented below by perhaps the worst photo to ever exist of the place, for sheer boring-ness.
I got a few good photos out of the place, though. Like Los Angeles valley from Mulholland Drive (no, that's not Julia Roberts in the foreground, it's Lisa):
Or the view of the Pacific coast just a bit south of Santa Barbara, toward Pismo Beach (there's a Bugs Bunny joke somewhere in there):
Or maybe even John Lithgow at a red-carpet event at the Dorothy Parker Pavillion, where they used to hold the Oscar ceremonies. We went to a Los Angeles Symphony reading of "Midsummer's Night Dream" and ran into a boatload of celebrities up-close and personal. (You do NOT realize how tiny and thin Portia de Rossi is in real life, geez. Or how wildly unkempt David E. Kelley looks.)
(John's sort of in the distance in the center, there. Yeah, the riffraff had to keep back.)
And one of the last things I saw was Stacy's ferret, Tribble. Ferrets are illegal in California. But you'll never get Stacy's address out of ME.
And then it was out of there and back toward home ... after an earthquake, of course (7.3, only 100 miles from downtown L.A. - maybe you saw on the news the Amtrak train derailed in the Mojave Desert? Yeah, we drove by it), then eons of desert, then a blizzard in New Mexico at freakin' MIDNIGHT that lasted for eight inches. DID I MENTION IT WAS FUCKING NEW MEXICO?
And, I can't wait to do it again!
