Sunset Over Walmart.

I have been wanting, since our arrival, to take a dramatic sunset picture from our west-facing balcony. Well, it's our only balcony, but it happens to face west. Every night since we arrived we have made it back to the hotel too late to take the picture. The picture to the left is called Sunset Over Some Random Palm Tree in Redondo Beach. Because that's where we were at the time.

As is usual, we have had a fascinating day. All was going well until after breakfast, where we discovered a nugget of wisdom that all should heed:

A Blueberry Muffin is not strong enough to hold open an elevator door.

It's true. And the plastic plate wasn't much help either. I came out of the breakfast room to find Mum (Gran) firmly held by her muffin, unable to let it go, and with coffee in her other hand. I rescued her with a speedy push of the elevator button, and we headed back to the breakfast room to remake her breakfast.

When we got up to our room, we were locked out. Not the usual hotel problem where for some random reason the key stops working, but the far more interesting one of the little security bar thingy pushing itself over after we had left the room. It's not the sort of thing you would normally think about, since it's designed to only be opened and closed from inside the room.

Obviously it is a more common occurance than we thought, since they have a special tool to open the door with when this happens. Unfortunately the desk creature did not know how to use it, but eventually one of the cleaning staff came and did it for her.

Thank goodness the rest of the day was uneventful. We went to a Galleria Mall in Redondo beach, then went down to the pier for a walk. I stuck my feet in the ocean, we took some pictures, and we headed back to the hotel.

On the way back, we were mesmerized by the number of flights landing at the downtown LA airport. I managed to get a shot of something I had never seen before. Two planes landing at the same time. From our perspective (which was very good) these two touched down within a couple of seconds of each other. I didn't know they were allowed to do that! Scary.

Tomorrow we head for home. This has been a crazy trip. Drum Corps, like anything else that is primarily US based, is really big on recaps. So here is ours.

We have travelled by plane, van, bus, more bus, scary rickety old bus, rail, and Federal Express.

We have ridden end to end on all of the lines of the Metro Rail system in Los Angeles, with the exception of one small branch of the blue line. If we had the time, we would do that one too, just to complete the set.

We have seen many places that were familiar to us from movies and TV:
The San Fernando Valley (not what we expected); China Town (once from a bus, once from the Metro Rail); Redondo Beach (very nice); Pasadena (also very nice); Hollywood and Vine (granted, we only saw this one from the bottom - the metro rail is actually a subway here.) Sunset Boulevard (ditto).

We logged 16 hours of travel on transit in three days to see the kids for a total of 45 minutes, and watch two very exciting drum corps events.

We have met and conversed with dozens of friendly, helpful and interesting people (and the homeless world travelling genius).

We are sunburned, dehydrated, and exhausted.

We finally managed the Sunset over Walmart picture, but not by much, and the sun had already set.

We have had a wonderful time.

See you all when we get back.

BRONZE MEDAL!!!!

Another day in the sun, and we have graduated from strawberries to pickled beets. This time, we were prepared with hats, battery operated fans, sunblock and lots of water - but the heat was relentless. I now really understand what is meant by the sun "beating down" on things.

The show was even better than yesterday. You could feel the enthusiasm from the field and the crowd was involved right from the start of the 2001 fanfare.

Wes' solo was flawless. David has so many parts that stand out, and he carried them all off perfectly.

The other corps performing were all excellent, which is to be expected at the finals level, so the competition was very stiff. Getting to the finals at all is a huge accomplishment at the DivIII level - getting a medal was beyond their wildest dreams. I'm sure they will be wearing their medals to bed for the next little while. In addition to the bronze, the corps also won a "Most Improved Corps" award, for improvement over last year, and the president of Disney World awarded them with a special "Spirit of Disney" trophy - given to the corps with the most exciting show from a Disney perspective. These awards were all given at a full corps retreat, where, as was fitting, we had the biggest flag.

So they are off to have fun now. Plans for the beach, shopping trips and some sort of amusement park have been set, and given the three hours of time between us and them, we will not likely see them again until we get home.

As for us, we have no idea what our plans for tomorrow are. We are hoping to get to the coast, and maybe do some shopping. Whatever we do, we are also hoping it doesn't include our usual 5 to 6 hours of travel, or sitting for hours in the sun.

The main point of the trip has been completed. I wouldn't have missed this for anything.

Mad Dogs, Englishmen and Us

I have discovered a new definition for strawberry blonde. My hair colour is close enough to blonde during the summer, and my face is certainly a lovely shade of strawberry, thanks to the clear skies and south facing seats at the staduim. We sat in direct sunlight from 10:30 until 1:30 today at the show, and we are getting ready to do it all again tomorrow.

Dutch Boy was brilliant at semi-finals, and has made it into the finals in fourth place, but just less than a fifth of a point behind third. They have beaten the corps in third place before, so there is a possibility that they could get a medal tomorrow!

Thankfully, today's travelling was not as eventful as yesterday's. Although that was great fun, we were more in the mood for smooth and simple today. It is almost a three hour trip to Pasadena from here, and we have to leave at 7:20 to get there on time.

Points of interest: We have now covered all but two small arms of all of the lines on the LA metro system. I am fascinated with the way each stop has been decorated by the community it serves, and have included some pictures. The first one has particular significance to us in light of certain events in our office the day before we left. To the right here are some of the seats at Museum station. Chinatown station is a big colourful pagoda - and most of the others are decorated with local artwork, sculptures done by local kids, weird sheet metal heads, and all manner of other things. Including, in some cases grafitti.

Tonight, we ate at our neighbourhood restaurant where we are now on a first name basis with a good percentage of the staff, and then walked over to Walmart for supplies for tomorrow - like sun hats, sun screen, and battery operated fans. It was only 90 degrees in Pasadena today. Tomorrow, they tell us, it is going to be HOT!

Much Ado About Everything

The hardest task we are going to have tonight is figuring out how to put everything that happened today into one entry.

The day started well. We found a place that sold my camera battery charger, and decided that since it was such a beautiful and cool morning, that we would walk the just over 3 and a half miles and get some exercise.

The trees along the route were gorgeous, although we didn't have a camera to photograph them with, and our plan worked perfectly well with us arriving at the camera supply place a little hot and tired, but glad we had decided to walk.

We were tired enough that we figured we would take a bus back, though, and we sat down at the bus station with a very nice young couple who gave up their seats in the shade for us old people. We eventually saw our bus. We saw it turn the corner. We saw it drive past us. We saw it happily continue down the road without us.

"Hey" says I, the sophisticated bus traveller, "were we supposed to stand up to let him know we wanted to get on?"

Apparently that is how you get on a bus. The driver's secret mind ray powers are usually turned off when he is driving, so you need to signal him. Go figure. We called for a cab.

The helpful girl at the "Hungry Boy" burger place gave us a number for a taxi company. As they were all spanish speaking, the taxi company was a spanish one. I didn't have an address for he dispatcher, just a corner, and he kept asking me "do you know how much?" I figured he should be the one to know how much, since I've never been in one of his cabs before, and I told him so. It wasn't until later that I realized he meant the street number, not the dollar amount.

We had lunch at the Sizzler, a restaurant on the same property as the hotel, it was a good lunch, although we are going to give them lessons on the correct way to make a cup of tea. As we were leaving, the gentleman that served us, and the guy who bussed the tables, said goodbye, followed by farewells from the counter staff, and even the girl in the kitchen who yelled from the back to wish us a nice day and ask us to come back soon.

After sampling the local taxis, we decided it was time to try the local transit. We mapped out a route on the Metro trip finder website, and set out to find the kids. We had their address in the San Fernando Valley, and the trip finder told us it would take between 2 and 3 hours to get to them.

The first bus driver was fabulous. Despite the fact that we bumbled around, blocked the doorway, stopped her other passengers from boarding, didn't know where we were going or how much it was, and repeatedly stood up on the moving bus to ask her questions, she was patient and helpful. We initially bought the wrong pass, but she straightened us out, and refunded our original tickets. My day pass was $5, and the senior pass was $1.80. These entitled us to unlimited travel throughout all areas of the GLAA. After all that she told us she wished all of her passengers were like us. I wondered how her bus would ever leave the station if that was the case. Feeling correctly that we were too inept to find a Metro station unattended, she stopped the bus between scheduled stops right at the escalators down to the station.

The metro rail part was quick and easy. It left us in North Hollywood where we had almost an hour to wait for our bus. NOHO as they call it, is very pretty, and we took some pictures of the mountains around.

I have always had a picture of the San Fernando valley in my head. My vision of it contains a beautiful, lush area, filled with palm trees and cool breezes, and sub tropical fruit and things. In actuality SFV Avenue is lined with little business that Fred Sanford would have been proud to own, and places that look like they belong in reruns of Chico and the Man. Our trip planner had given us the closest bus stop to the kid's hotel, but not how to get to it, so after being on the most rickety bus we had seen to date for the best part of an hour, we set off on foot in search of the GoodNite Inn.

We wandered down SFV ave for a while, because we thought we may have seen a sign, then stopped in at a motel to ask directions. They looked puzzled, gestured to us in Spanish, and sent us off in a vaguely southern direction down "a street". We kept wandering down nameless little streets, getting hotter and hotter all the time, and still not having any idea where we were going. Finally we spotted a courier van (we promised we wouldn't tell which one of them it was), but one of the sort that gets the packages there guaranteed by 10am, and asked directions.

"What? You're walking?" says he, "Yes." says we. He didn't like that very much, and after two or three seconds of soul searching told us to jump in the cab.

So, like so much baggage, we were delivered to the hotel. No one signed for us.

He did tell us when he saw us walking, he imagined his Mother and Sister, and just could not let us continue walking in the heat.

Finally when we arrived, after over three hours of travel, The Kids Weren't There.

We found some of the Dutch Boy volunteers at the motel, and they told us that they would be back in about an hour, so we sat next door at the Denny's until we spotted them.

We had about 15 minutes before we had to hike through the heat almost a mile back to the bus stop, so we could start the whole thing again only backwards.

San Fernando valley looks even scarier in the dark.

We made it back to the NOHO station just in time to miss the train. But it was OK, because we had the company of a (now homeless) world travelling Genius who at one time had to choose between a good school in Boston and school in NY, but now is put out because no one ever invites him for dinner and he doesn't ever get invited to sleep with the girl from the beach. How the mighty have fallen.

The train came eventually, and we managed to loose him in the crush. Funny thing we discovered on the way home - we don't have to take busses at all, except for 10 minutes from the hotel to the metro station. The rail lines go just about everywhere. We took an educated guess at the rail route back, and got here about 20 minutes sooner than we thought.

Someone should tell the computerized Trip Planner.

A Comedy of, well, Comedy....

I am starting this out sitting at the desk in the Comfort Inn, weather balmy enought that we have the windows open in the room and we can see and hear the palm trees outside. We have been here for about an hour.

Our room last night in Detroit was not exactly a disaster, but was not anything worth writing about, so we won't. We are now in a perfectly standard Comfort Inn, but we feel like we are staying at the Ritz in comparison.

Flights were great, little turbulance, great visibility, and no delays. We passed within 7 miles of the Grand Canyon and didn't even stop. Of course, they were 7 vertical miles, so the stop would have been a bit drastic, but is was my first time seeing the GC, and it was fascinating.

The hotel website was right. There was a shuttle from the airport to the hotel. What they neglected to mention was that it was more of a taxi service, really, and that it was $54 (+ the inevitable tip).

We have a very tasteful stucco WalMart across the street, as well as bountiful restaurants like Denny's and burger places within an easy walk. The half hour trip to the stadium site will take us up to three hours according to the "Make a trip" function on the Metro website, and the Metro station that is "right across the street" according the hotel site is really 2 and a half miles away.

We will have to post pictures tomorrow, because I forgot the charger for my camera battery, and will have to go and buy one tomorrow morning. I also forgot my phone charger, but I do have Rob's, so if anyone wants to contact either of us, do it quick.

That's it for now, we are just having a leisurely evening to catch up and rest from the travel. We are heading off to pick up some supper, and will be calling the kids at their hotel in about an hour.

See you tomorrow....