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.