Los Angeles Part 1

LA is another one of those towns that people either love or they hate. I've wavered between the two, going from love to hate, and now finally, to the thought that it's great for a visit, but that I'm not a "lifer," as they say.

Our host was the awesome and magnificent Jon Lee, who I've known since college through my attempts to become more culturally aware. The best part about hanging out with Jon in his town is that he knows the delish food spots.

We got in late and Jon whisked us to a great Korean place, of which no pictures exist, because we demolished the food - some short ribs, some delicious fish, which I can't recall the name of right now (mackerel?), and of course the requisite small plates that you get with the meal (if I were a more Asian Asian, perhaps I would know the name to these, regardless, they included kimchi). We stopped for dessert in Chinatown, where we got a tapioca drink, a Mango shaved ice, and through some weird English translation (red bean rice balls), a giant bowl of hot red bean soup with these sweet rice balls in it filled with black sesame. Our first bowl came with a hair in it, but don't worry, the second one was all clean.

The next day, on Christina's tip, we went to Silverlake to get coffee at Intelligentsia. All barbs at hipsters aside, these baristas know how to make some delicious coffee. We then met Jon and Anna (just in from Oakland) for lunch at Porto's in Burbank, which is this insanely gigantic Cuban bakery and eatery. Between the four of us, we split potato balls, a tamale, a Cuban sandwich, a roast pork sandwich, a giant salad with supplemental Tapatio hot sauce as dressing, and even though Jon claimed to have "restrained" himself, like half a dozen cheese rolls and various other baked goods. Needless to say, we were stuffed after that.

Timmy and I then checked out Chuck Jones:An Animator's Life from A to Z-Z-Z-Z at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. A lot of amazing backgrounds and original sketches were there and it was really great. Plenty of old cartoons that you would certainly remember if you saw the storyboards. No pictures were allowed, unfortunately.

Then, in true LA fashion, we did some shopping, checking out various furniture and design stores, and the giant Opening Ceremony after being shut down at Huntington Gardens, who had run out of tickets for the day

We headed back to Jon's where hours flew by because we were mesmerized by the Mall Cops show on TLC. Before we knew it, it was late and we were hungryyyyyy. We decided to go to Daikokuya, which Jon said is one of the best ramen joints in LA. It was like 9 pm on a Tuesday and we figured that it wouldn't be crowded... totally wrong. We get there and they tell us it's going to be an hour and a half for a table of four. Bummer. So we instead go to another ramen place in Japantown with decent ramen and delicious fried rice. As we are sitting in this ramen joint, Jon says that we should go back to Daikokuya. Basically, all of us called the idea stupid and then immediately started thinking about going. So we get back to Daiko and our names are at the top of the list. What else would we do? So they called our name and we went inside to get our second batch of ramen in less than an hour.


MMMMMMMMM


Notice the only person to look upset at all that ramen is Tim. Happy and wayyyy too full, we went home, where I got to see my old junior high friend Kiran for a few minutes.

The Road to LA

One bad thing about having a legit place to stay at night is that we seem to be more slow in the mornings, since we don't have to stealth pack and quickly find a place to pee. That was the case the morning we left San Mateo and started heading to my favorite creeper's (Jon Lee) city of residence (Los Angeles).

We stopped in San Clemente (questionably; we don't remember) for lunch and some internetting at our favorite chain for reliable wifi, Starbucks. If you know us, you know we looooove Mexican food and we picked the place that had no English menu and a line at 11am. I got my usual, lengua, and we think Tim had carne asada. We rounded out our solid lunch selections with giant horchatas and a cheese quesadilla.



Aghhh so delicious. We need a place like this in NH. I mean, I love me some Chipotle but let's be forreal here...

So after lunch we started driving up the Pacific Coast Highway, which meant we hit all the big beach towns - Laguna, Newport, Huntington. Unfortunately for Tim, it was super windy and there was no surfing to be had in these surftowns. Sorry Timmy.

We did take Fred, who often just stays in the van all day while we run about, to the Huntington dog beach. We've mentioned this a million times, but Fred loves the beach. There was no exception to this one, which is an awesome beach, filled with people hanging out with their pups and enjoying the surf. Here's another standard picture of Fred on a beach.


After that, we stopped at a few awesome surf shops, which is one part of Tim's surf love that I wholeheartedly support. We had to visit the classic Katin surf shop, obvi. Katin is the company that basically invented board shorts (as we know them) in the late 50s. They are made of heavy canvas and pretty good looking. We also stopped by Seal Beach to visit Harbour, who made Tim's yellow longboard. If we had a million dollars, Tim would have bought out the whole store.

After speaking to Jon, he let us know that we should stay there to wait out that infamous LA traffic, so we stayed for some drinks and apps at 320 Main, where their cocktail schtick is pre-Prohibition drinks. I had an Old Fashioned and Tim had a Moscow Mule served in an awesome copper mug. They have awesome ice cubes (does that sound weird?) and the biggest collection of bitters I've ever seen. Delicious.

Now, off to our LA adventures!

Camping in San Mateo, surfing at San O'

Our jaunt through Las Vegas set us off course for San Diego. Not wanting to drive quite that far south just to drive up again, I picked a surf spot I always wanted to paddle out at but never got the chance, San O, and made that our destination.


It doesn't look like much, June gloom is a real thing in California, but I had a pretty fun surf here.


Freddie's leash is secured under one of those rocks. That was enough to keep him in one place. He was welcomed to the California coast, though, by being attacked by a guy's small, recently acquired rescue dog. Freddie was pretty bummed and spent the rest of our stay on this beach in the van.


There are a handful of campgrounds in the area and we found an open slot in San Mateo. While this is not the first time we parked at a campground, it would mark the first time in the trip that we started our own campfire.


As foreign to us as the gambling and sexual debauchery of Las Vegas is the casual camper's lifestyle. We've gotten pretty good at stealthily parking in dark areas of parking lots and confidently walking to the back of restaurants to use their restroom without purchasing a crumb of food, but sleeping in the dirt and sharing a coin operated shower with hundreds of RVing Americans is just not our cup of tea. On this particular night, however, we got the urge to at least mildly participate. So we bought a log bundle from the campground toll booth, picked up the classic hot dog and s'more ingredients and set about lighting some shit on fire.



I had done laundry at the Ace before we left but I don't like putting my white tees in the dryer. This is what a crazy person's clothesline might look like.


We accidentally and very stupidly left our food out overnight. The forest critters ate all of our chocolate and some Doritos. This giant bird came back for breakfast.

We checked the surf again in the morning. I decided to pass and we started driving north to LA.

Palm Springs (honeymoon)

There's a certain amount of pressure one puts on oneself to discover new things at every moment during exploratory traveling and this can be an extremely exhausting prospect. We decided to give ourselves a break from the exploration and celebrate our 2 day old marriage in Palm Springs. We stayed at the Ace Hotel. We left the hotel two times for one very specific thing, to get new brakes on the van. The rest of our two night / two day stay there was spent at the hotel restaurant, the hotel bar, the hotel pool, and inside the hotel room with hotel room service. It was absolutely lovely. Below is the lone picture taken poolside in Palm Springs with my cell phone.


We did not buy any Ace sneakers or Ace board shorts or Ace screen prints of the Ace Hotel. Lots of other guests seemed to be in a buying mood, though. You guys are pretty cool.

Also, Michelle took these pretty great photos of the wind farms on the way to Palm Springs.



See you suckers in San Onofre.

The Gun Store, Las Vegas

We hung out at Sears Auto Center for several hours on June 27 waiting for not just one, but both tie rods in the front of the car to be fixed. As we were finally on our way out, Tim remembered that Damion had told us to go to The Gun Store. I was hard pressed to go since I was very eager to get out of town, but the girls outside told us we could bring Freddie in with us so then I figured, why not.

So The Gun Store is a place in Las Vegas is a store that you can buy guns at but where you can also shoot various kinds of handguns, automatics, and semiautomatics. Of course, the whole place was crawling with British dudes when we were in there, all of whom were peeing their pants and holding several hundred dollars worth of ammo.

Timmy chose an AK 47 to fire 25 rounds with, and I went with the ladies' package, which included 20 rounds with a handgun, 25 with the AK 47 and a free t shirt. Pretty good deal, right?

We waited for a few minutes after picking out ear protection, eye protection, and targets. We got the classic shooting targets, although there were plenty of threatening options (read: non white targets). We could only go in one at a time, so Timmy went in first.

Our gun pro was a vaguely attractive blonde who was made more attractive by her tattoos and penchant for guns. More attractive or more insane, I'm not sure I remember now. She told us how to hold the gun properly and how to aim and not shoot ourselves or anyone else.

Timmy was done quite soon, as 25 rounds ain't nothin in an AK 47. I was next and I gotta tell you, three shots into the handgun, I was wondering when it would all be over.

If you look closely in the second picture, I would like to point out that I in fact got a bullet in the kill zone (kill zone??) of the target. YEA! Also, I wish the picture of me and the AK 47 showed the pink stock of the gun and the picture of Hello Kitty also holding an AK and in protective gear.

So that was the last of our Las Vegas experience. After having all of that bullet adrenaline rushing through our veins, we got back into ol non threatening Vanpers and drove off into the desert and to our "honeymoon" in Palm Springs!

Las Vegas

If it's not clear, we aren't what you would deem 'Las Vegas People." Some people like the gambling, the drinking, and the legal prostitution, but well, I'm not so sold on it. But we knew that Route 15 led straight to Vegas, and we also knew that could only mean one thing.

We were getting married.

It had started on the way to Zion, when Timmy looked over at me and said, "Will you marry me in Las Vegas?" And I said, "What? No, shut up. That's stupid." Repeat these few lines a couple of times and after I had determined that he was serious, we decided to spend a night and think about it.

The next day we were on the road as usual and I asked Timmy, "well, should I call my sister?" and he said, "yeah, call her up!." So I called Cinders and told her I needed her in Vegas for a very specific reason (not Blue Man Group tickets). After I hung up with her, Kory (my Brother-in-law) immediately rang to double check if I was "bullshitting" my sister. I told him that I was not in fact bullshitting. They told us they would be there, no matter what!

At this point we were quite close to the city and decided to stop at the outlets to get the wedding outfits. Timmy didn't quite find anything, but I picked up a blue and gray dress at Calvin Klein. We checked into a hotel courtesy of Cinders and her insane rewards points and booked the chapel. Unfortunately, even though we had a bowtie for Fred, the chapel said no pups allowed. We checked him into Camp BowWow, where he could play with other dogs all day and we could watch on the live webcam. Mainly he just stood in one place with his tail down :(

We set back out to find rings and potential other outfits, scouring all of the giant indoors fashion malls and even a nice outside one outside of the main strip. This was very tiring and vaguely frustrating, but after dozens of hours and a few Hot Dogs on Sticks we had procured one ladies' ring from Banana Republic (with pyramid studs and worth 10 American Dollars), one men's ring from H&M (5 American Dollars), some wedding sandals for me from Aldo, and a Timmy wedding outfit from Am Appy (American Apparel).

We got to tell our parents via telephone of our plans and although they were surprised, we did receive their blessings. We also made a late afternoon stop to get our marriage license, which took all of 5 minutes, since we had IDs, $60 cash, and were legal residents (cannot be said for the other two couples there with us). A fun activity could probably be stopping by the license place at 11pm on a Saturday night (they close at midnight).

As night fell, our guests started to trickle into the airport. Damion was picked up first, after getting the go ahead from his wife, with the caveat that he needed to be home for Zuri's Handy Manny themed 3rd Birthday party. Cindy and Kory came next, and that was all the guests.

We decided to walk around the Strip and after seeing many giant margarita blenders, stopped into Margaritaville for a 100 oz group blender. Hilarious. While we were there, we enjoyed the house cover band (just kidding, they were embarrassing) ((just kidding again, they didn't even try to hit the high notes in Livin on a Prayer, so that makes them smart)). After Kory got hollered at by a group of ladies (who shouted, BALD GUY! WOOOO) and we were yawning our faces off, Cinders and I went home and the boys stayed out causing trouble til about 5 am.


The next morning, aka wedding day, we had brunch at Hashhouse A Go Go, had delicious Bloody Marys and Fried Chicken and Waffles. Delicious. They had signed pictures from both Martha Stewart and the guy from Man Vs Food. Very important to go to places endorsed by both of those people. This is their signature chicken and waffles arrangement. As you may have noticed, we took very few pictures in LV, just too much excitement. But, being the fatties we are, we did manage to get a shot of the food. Sigh.

I had been shirking on flower duties but talked to the concierge and she helped me out big time. I was able to talk on the phone to the florist, who was at the flower market and was able to snag some hot pink peonies, which my mom had planted all along the deck in the backyard. By the time we got back from brunch, my flowers were already there. Thanks Vegas!

So we all got fancied up and I made sure I had my something old (diamond necklace), something new (outlet dress which I had to fix up a bit the night before), something borrowed (a pearl ring and a brooch), and something blue (toenail polish).


We hopped into a cab to the Little Chapel of the West and did the damn thing. For being a chapel that has many weddings per day, the pastor was emotive and good at his job. We saw many other wedding parties, many with plenty of guests and actual wedding dresses and bridesmaids, but we preferred our off the cuff style. Our wedding was on the website for a little bit, but I think by now it must be off. Seven minutes after we stepped in, we stepped out a married couple!


We got a stretch limo and cruised around the Strip for a little bit while drinking a magnum of Cook's and ended our night at Bellagio. We had a few delicious drinks and gambled a tiny bit of money away before we had a glorious buffet. Man, that buffet was awesome.

Timmy drove Damion back to the airport that very night and to help us celebrate, Vanpy's tie rod broke in the parking lot of the hotel and her right front wheel was all crazy crooked. Cindy and Kory left early that morning and we were left to celebrate our post wedding day by sitting in a Sears Auto Center.

To our friends who sent their love via Twitter, Facebook, text message, emails, and phone calls last month: thank you! To Cindy, Kory, and Damion: we can't ever thank you enough for making the ridiculous trip to see us. Having you all there made the moment so much more special. We love you guys.

Utah and Zion National Park

We hadn't planned on going to Utah. Like many states it has a reputation for one thing... with many more things to offer. We found this out at Zion National Park. Pictured above: not Michelle's best drive-by welcome sign photo.


This lake was called Lone Rock Lake. We think. It might also be called Rip-off Lake, No Shade At All Lake, or Friendly Europeans Scamming the Parks System Lake. Some euros stopped us before we got to the toll entrance and gave us their parking ticket which they were done using. We stayed for about 20 minutes and bounced. We tried to pass on the ticket, but apparently no one trusts a giant green van.


That rock mound in the middle was called Molly's Nipple. We giggled.


This is Freddie barking viciously at a herd of corralled buffalo. They stampeded away in fright. Just kidding, they kept eating grass.


We were lucky to enter Zion National Park through a somewhat back road - a winding route which starts at the top of the canyon and snakes its way down down to the bottom. It was sooo incredibly gorgeous - easily among the best few miles of drive for the entire trip.


There were a handful of awesome tunnels which went right through the mountains, and they had these windows with views of the canyon.





As is usually the case, we arrived too late to reserve a spot at campground. So we milled around the visitors' center, drank some of the spring water on tap, and looked at bats. I have an obsession with immersing myself in nearby natural bodies of water, so we also found a spot in the shallow river where I could sit on some mossy rocks and wash my sins away. Ok, not sins so much as the last couple days of grease since we hadn't had the chance to shower for a bit. Michelle was scared of the 2 foot deep creek so she did not partake.

Like I said, no campground, so we found a dark area of the parking lot to park ol' Vanpers and settle in...


...for a couple hours until park security kicked us out. Bummer. We slept on the road just outside the park entrance and re-entered the next day to ride the shuttle bus, NOT hike, and take more pictures.

Grand Canyon, AZ

We got into the Grand Canyon late at night, which I recommend highly, since that means you don't have to pay your entrance fee. I mean, we have a National Parks pass, so it doesn't really matter, but just to let yall know... early morns and late nights = free park entrance.


We spent the night in a parking lot right by the visitors center and woke up the next morning to take a hike to the rim. The elevation is about 7000 feet, enough so it got nice and chilly in the van at night. We took a walk with Fred for about a mile to see some nice views.


The size of the Grand Canyon is almost unfathomable, and definitely worth a trip out to AZ.



On our way out of the park, we saw a giant elk on the side of the road!


We also visited The Watchtower, designed by Mary Colter, the same woman who did La Posada.

The Watchtower at night



It was undergoing a bit of renovation, but still really nice.

But, it was time to move on, as always, and we jetted outta there and onwards to Utah!

Hopi Villages or How We Didn't Go to Phoenix

Michelle and I visited the Hopi villages on First, Second, and Third Mesa. These are all towns within a Hopi reservation in Arizona and they don't allow any pictures. At all. We have enough Kachina dolls and fox pelts, however, to prove we were there.


Joseph and Janice Day, owners of Tsakurshovi are the sweetest people looking to sell stuff to naive tourists ever - but we didn't learn this until the second time we visited them.

Ahem.

On our first occasion in the shop, we were taken off-guard when Joseph berated us a bit for wanting to go to Phoenix. He's quite passionate about the places he feels are really worth seeing on the Colorado Plateau, but we hadn't planned for the 12 week excursion around this relatively small area that he would expect of us. So we felt a little attacked and left the store feeling pretty bummed. But because I can get a bit obsessive, I wasn't ok leaving this negative interaction with an otherwise charming couple hanging out there in the universe. We went back to the shop a couple hours later to explain there may have been a misunderstanding, that we'd like to support their store, and that we'd love for them to tell us where to go in Northern Arizona/ Southern Utah. We left with a detailed map of the area, heavily hand-highlighted by Joseph, and a few hundred dollars worth of desert swag.

This is how we ended up not going south to Phoenix but rather to the road leading us through Las Vegas. (foreshadowing)

Winslow, AZ (La Posada Hotel)

Even with a drive through the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert, the ride from Holbrook to Winslow was short. Like, really short. We got to the hotel so early, in fact, that we had no choice but to stop for lunch, once again, at Sonic. I don't know why we go to Sonic so much. We don't like it very much at all, and there is plenty of fast food we prefer over it. Maybe it's the carhop service, but probably not. I think this was actually our last time at this trash basket. The limeades are ok.

Our friends Chiyo, Ashley, and Zeke put together an amazing NM/AZ guide for us. Thanks, guys! It was so helpful during our time in the desert, and if they hadn't told us about it we probably never would have stopped to spend a night at La Posada Hotel.


The hotel was the vision of Southwest entrepreneur Fred Harvey and designed by architect Mary Jane Colter. Built in 1929 for the Santa Fe Railway, closed in 1957, and after 40 years it was privately bought and restored to its original beauty. It's an amazing place and we felt lucky to have a chance to spend some time there.






The interior is gorgeous: classic southwestern without being tacky.


There's some pretty ok good art hanging, as well. The contrast between the contemporary and classic was really nice. I like this painting of old ladies. Awkward angle.





There are some great outdoor spaces, too, very peaceful. The Santa Fe Railway still runs through the backyard.

After Sonic, check-in, and some wandering around the hotel, Michelle and I did we do best. Nap until it's time to eat again.



We had an amazing dinner at The Turqoise Room, the hotel restaurant. Sweet corn and spicy black bean soup, fried stuffed squash blossoms, a locally raised lamb sampler platter, and elk medallions. Our biggest food splurge of the trip. The restaurant can also pack a lunch for the next day upon request. So for our Hopi village excursion the next morning, we ordered some normal lunch stuff: prime rib and pasta salad. It was tough to check out, we considered another night many times, but decided to move on.