During the girls' winter break from school we made our annual pilgrimage to the southwest. This year we didn't have such a bad winter to escape from, but temperatures in the 70s and 80s were still pretty nice.
We usually go to both Tucson, AZ and Palm Desert, CA, with a little side trip to Las Vegas for Carol and me. We have another trip with Carol's parents coming up so this year we only visited my parents in Palm Desert.
The cheapest/easiest flight was into San Diego. One thing we've wanted to do with the kids near San Diego is visit Legoland. Our kids are just the right age for it so we decided we had to do it. At the last minute a friend even hooked us up with some discounted tickets that saved us a bundle.
Legoland was fun. We were there when it opened and did the whole park. The best attraction was the "driving school"; it has 20 or so small electric cars on a miniature street grid with stop signs and traffic signals. Kids can drive wherever they want for about five minutes. The girls also drove boats and rode jousting horses and a log flume ride and Audrey climbed a LEGO firefighter training tower. We also wandered through Minitown which has LEGO versions of various places like Manhattan, Washington D.C., a New England fishing town, San Francisco, the Las Vegas strip, etc. and a whole Star Wars section with recreated locations/scenes from the movies.
After our fun day at Legoland we drove over the mountains to Palm Desert to start our visit with Grandma and Grandpa.
We spent a day getting settled in before Carol and I made our annual escape. We usually drive across the Mojave Desert to Las Vegas. We really love the drive across the Mojave on back roads, but we were tired of Vegas. So we decided to visit Los Angeles instead.
While researching what we should do in LA we came across the debate between two restaurants who claim to have invented the French Dip sandwich: Phillipe The Original and Cole's. Both are in downtown LA.
Our first stop when we arrived was Phillipe The Original. It's in Chinatown so we got to explore that area and the Pueblo which is the area where Los Angeles was first settled. The French Dip at Phillipe was pretty good. There's not really a lot of range to ruin a French Dip or make it spectacular, but it was good. One interesting thing at that location is they serve it "wet": they dip the open face of the roll in au jus before serving it and they don't serve it with a bowl of au jus. A regular in line also told us to get the tapioca pudding and they were right, it was delicious.
After that we explored the Pueblo area and also made our way to the old downtown area, especially Broadway. I have been to LA area many times but I had never been downtown. I was surprised to find an area that could be mistaken for parts of Manhattan if it weren't entirely (not just partially) Hispanic. I loved that seemingly most of the big old movie houses are still there. They aren't used as theaters any more but there are at least a dozen along Broadway that still have their marquees and big vertical signs and beautiful edifices.
Then we made our way to the ocean near where we were staying in Marina Del Mar. We passed through Venice on the way and the sun was about to set. We used our phones to search for a place with a view and found a fantastic one: the rooftop bar at the Hotel Erwin. We got there in time to enjoy the full sunset and it was very romantic.
Our main goal while in LA was to visit the Getty Museum. Neither Carol or I had ever been. We toured the entire thing, spending 6 1/2 glorious hours enjoying art with no kids. Getty collected mostly European paintings and furnishings from the 13th-19th centuries and it is all arranged chronologically. It's a great review of art history. It's also a stark illustration of the scale of wealth of the very rich: Getty not only had enough money to buy all that art, but also enough to spend $1 billion building a museum and institute to hold it all. Nice hobby.
We each had our favorite works of art. One of mine was a pastel by Jean-Etienne Liotard (I had never heard of him before). Imagine trying to make that picture essentially with crayons! It's more amazing in person with the texture of the hair, the velvet and the dog fur.
After the Getty we wandered over to Hollywood Boulevard. We came across what we thought was a movie shoot but soon realized it was setup for the Academy Awards. This was on Thursday before the awards on Sunday. There is a photo of Carol on the red carpet in the photo album above.
The next day we drove up into Malibu. I had been part way up the Malibu coast before but didn't realize it is more then 20 miles long. We went maybe two thirds of the way and then took small roads over the mountains into the valley. Then we drove Mulholland Drive along the crest of the Hollywood Hills to get back to LA. I entertained the idea of hiking up to the Hollywood sign but after reading about it online it didn't sound all that interesting. You can't get close to the sign without trespassing.
Once back in LA we headed for the other purported origin of the French Dip sandwich, Cole's. For you Seattleites, Cole's would fit right in in Pioneer Square - liked a cleaned up J&M or Merchant's Cafe. This sandwich was also pretty good. Carol liked it better than Phillipe's, but mainly for the better ambiance. After lunch we hit the road back to Palm Desert.
We returned to some very happy kids who had spent about 4 hours a day every day in the pool with their Aunt Betsy. Grandma and Grandpa were pretty tired. We took the girls to the city's new aquatic center for several hours two days in a row. Audrey discovered water slides and couldn't get enough of them.
My old cycling club from Seattle has been having a "desert training camp" in February for the past two years. One of the members lives in nearby Indian Wells part of the year and started inviting the club down for a break from Seattle winters. Last year I brought my bike on the trip and rode with them, but I normally don't get to commute by bike from Christmas until early March so I'm not really in shape to keep up with them in February. Last year I rode with them for about 20 miles before being dropped. It was fun, but not worth carting a bike to California for. This year we just joined them for dinner Saturday night and we had a really nice time.
Airfares were much higher this year and another part of getting a cheaper fare was taking a red eye flight home. I figured we'd survive it and the girls would miss school on Monday and that would be that. But it was more miserable than I imagined. We learned that when Charlotte gets beyond tired she gets goofy and chatty. But poor Audrey gets shaky and unable to function. I remember from my own childhood how painful it felt to be exhausted and not able to go to sleep. We got home at 7:00 am, had some breakfast and then we all went to bed and slept until noon. The girls were really confused. They kept asking if they had slept all night and all day, and what day it was. The combination of jet lag and the red eye was too much. It took all week to recover. Won't do that again.
The return trip notwithstanding, we had a really great vacation.
