on the road: day one and two
Mar. 3rd, 2006 11:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
iridiumone:
we left the house in Sunnyvale sometime in the afternoon on Wednesday, after cleaning the car, repacking and loading, and generally puttering about for awhile. a good chill start to the day. we stopped maybe a mile down the road for lunch at an In&Out, then headed south on 101. (mmmmm...In&Out. the potato-smasher continues to amuse me.) dealing with rush hour traffic was relatively painless due to the HOV lane, so we drove south on 101 as far as Gilroy, then cut over to I-5. Gilroy does in fact smell strongly of garlic, and there were some neat spotted longhorn cattle by the road. we made it good time to LA, and Matilda did just fine over the hills. gas mileage still sucks, but i knew that already, so it's no big deal.
down through California: the sun set in the soft-edged hills behind us, and the sky was dark enough in the valley that i could see the outline of the whole moon alongside the bright narrow crescent. we stopped for gas on a little turnoff that runs up one of the hills and looked out over the miles of wide flat farmlands, bought dried mangos and candied ginger and headed back to the highway. it's plum-blossom season, and just about every other kind of fruit tree, so for miles there were ranks of short bushy trees covered in bright white or pale-pink flowers, shedding a carpet of petals along all their aisles. i'd love to see what the valley looks like 60 years after the apocalypse -- i imagine all the farmland lines and angles blurring, acres and acres of wild fruit orchards in tangles.
LA: the city lights up the sky from far away. up over the mountains and back down again, and then all the lights open up beneath us. (reminds me of sitting on a mountain in Albuquerque at sunset, watching the lights come on in waves over the whole city there.) a moment later, we dive back into the hills and everthing goes dark again, black-shadow mountain shapes on a grey night sky. we made it to Pasadena, found![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kilroi and E, went back out for "adequate Mexican and excellent margaritas". mango margaritas are tasty. i still probably shouldn't have had three of them, but we got a (very large) pitcher, and it needed finishing. obviously. a good evening, anyhow, and good to see kilroi again.
two:
breakfast and coffee withkilroi at a cafe at Caltech, and l_stboy and i pulled out the roadtrip book and maps, did some plotting and scheming and sitting in the sun. more good company for lunch, and then we headed out to Santa Monica and the ocean to see the Getty villa/museum. a strange, neat place -- modeled exactly on the floorplan of a villa in Pompeii, and stuffed full of many Greek and Roman artifacts. my favorite bits were the glass-making exhibit (really beautiful work, and i had no idea that the art of glassmaking was that advanced in ~100BC), the delicately carved cameos and signet/seals, and the Roman herb garden. (i think i liked the herb garden particularly because it was...relatively unostentatious, a little scraggly, but peaceful and full of fragrant rosemary and lavender.)
when the villa closed down for the evening, we went back out to the coast highway, drove a bit north, and then parked by the side of the road and tried not to get run over while looking for some scrap of beach not entirely occupied by gates and walls and houses. finally found a bit near an inlet that led into one of the canyons, scrambled down the path from the parking lot...and found ourselves surrounded by film-crew trucks. turned out that they were filming a commercial of some sort at the house on the edge of this bit of beach. *laugh* it all felt very much LA, or Malibu, or wherever it was we were.
but after all that, there was a rocky beach, and the ocean, and a beautiful subtle sunset. a bit of peace, standing out on the rocks in the shallow water, the steep hills on one side and the Pacific on the other.
and the end of the evening: driving back through LA traffic, listening to music, finally making it back to Pasadena for a chill quiet evening withkilroi and E. we watched the episode of Beauty and the Geek where Ankur got booted off the show, and confirmed again that television makes me twitch.
we left the house in Sunnyvale sometime in the afternoon on Wednesday, after cleaning the car, repacking and loading, and generally puttering about for awhile. a good chill start to the day. we stopped maybe a mile down the road for lunch at an In&Out, then headed south on 101. (mmmmm...In&Out. the potato-smasher continues to amuse me.) dealing with rush hour traffic was relatively painless due to the HOV lane, so we drove south on 101 as far as Gilroy, then cut over to I-5. Gilroy does in fact smell strongly of garlic, and there were some neat spotted longhorn cattle by the road. we made it good time to LA, and Matilda did just fine over the hills. gas mileage still sucks, but i knew that already, so it's no big deal.
down through California: the sun set in the soft-edged hills behind us, and the sky was dark enough in the valley that i could see the outline of the whole moon alongside the bright narrow crescent. we stopped for gas on a little turnoff that runs up one of the hills and looked out over the miles of wide flat farmlands, bought dried mangos and candied ginger and headed back to the highway. it's plum-blossom season, and just about every other kind of fruit tree, so for miles there were ranks of short bushy trees covered in bright white or pale-pink flowers, shedding a carpet of petals along all their aisles. i'd love to see what the valley looks like 60 years after the apocalypse -- i imagine all the farmland lines and angles blurring, acres and acres of wild fruit orchards in tangles.
LA: the city lights up the sky from far away. up over the mountains and back down again, and then all the lights open up beneath us. (reminds me of sitting on a mountain in Albuquerque at sunset, watching the lights come on in waves over the whole city there.) a moment later, we dive back into the hills and everthing goes dark again, black-shadow mountain shapes on a grey night sky. we made it to Pasadena, found
kilroi and E, went back out for "adequate Mexican and excellent margaritas". mango margaritas are tasty. i still probably shouldn't have had three of them, but we got a (very large) pitcher, and it needed finishing. obviously. a good evening, anyhow, and good to see kilroi again.two:
breakfast and coffee with
kilroi at a cafe at Caltech, and l_stboy and i pulled out the roadtrip book and maps, did some plotting and scheming and sitting in the sun. more good company for lunch, and then we headed out to Santa Monica and the ocean to see the Getty villa/museum. a strange, neat place -- modeled exactly on the floorplan of a villa in Pompeii, and stuffed full of many Greek and Roman artifacts. my favorite bits were the glass-making exhibit (really beautiful work, and i had no idea that the art of glassmaking was that advanced in ~100BC), the delicately carved cameos and signet/seals, and the Roman herb garden. (i think i liked the herb garden particularly because it was...relatively unostentatious, a little scraggly, but peaceful and full of fragrant rosemary and lavender.) when the villa closed down for the evening, we went back out to the coast highway, drove a bit north, and then parked by the side of the road and tried not to get run over while looking for some scrap of beach not entirely occupied by gates and walls and houses. finally found a bit near an inlet that led into one of the canyons, scrambled down the path from the parking lot...and found ourselves surrounded by film-crew trucks. turned out that they were filming a commercial of some sort at the house on the edge of this bit of beach. *laugh* it all felt very much LA, or Malibu, or wherever it was we were.
but after all that, there was a rocky beach, and the ocean, and a beautiful subtle sunset. a bit of peace, standing out on the rocks in the shallow water, the steep hills on one side and the Pacific on the other.
and the end of the evening: driving back through LA traffic, listening to music, finally making it back to Pasadena for a chill quiet evening with
kilroi and E. we watched the episode of Beauty and the Geek where Ankur got booted off the show, and confirmed again that television makes me twitch.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-03-03 09:05 pm (UTC)If we're correctly interpreting this tag written in Croatian, these millefiori pieces![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
coraline and I saw a couple years ago in Zagreb are also from the first century BC. We were pretty amazed by the detail; this bowl was maybe 4-7" across.
(Clicky for larger image)
(Also, if you're curious, there were a spirally bright yellow and aquamarine millefiori bowl and some millefiori fragments).
no subject
Date: 2006-04-08 05:26 am (UTC)yeah, it's neat stuff.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-05 09:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-08 05:27 am (UTC)i'm far behind in writing up the roadtrip, but then i don't think i ever posted a full account of the Galapagos either...