Living in Playa Del Rey

I thought it might be interesting to document some things about where we live, geographically and culturally.

Where we're living is probably about 100 feet from the sand of the beach. But to us it's not "beach weather". It's actually quite chilly, hanging out in the 60s all day and all night. The mornings are usually calm but at night it gets really windy and it's too cold to be outside comfortably.

I went out running on the beach at about 7AM on Wednesday. There's a nice paved bike path that goes probably 20 miles or more along the beach. When I was out, there were already surfers out in the (freezing cold!) water. The waves are really big here and they break very close into the shore. There's also a lot more sand between the water and the dunes, and the sand is different here than at home. It's a lot more coarse and has a lot more variance in color. (I'll take some pictures later.)

Overall, people seem pretty friendly here--much more friendly than Boston. Runners and bikers do acknowledge one another when they pass (it was weird for me in Boston when people seemed to pretend that I didn't exist!). The store clerks and restaurant staff, as well as all our coworkers, are all very nice. However, all that courtesy seems to disappear when inside a car. People are super-agressive drivers here, and we're not anywhere near the heart of the city. I've seen a lot of brave bikers riding in the bike lanes, but it'd make me very nervous to ride a bike on the road here. Also, here, motorcyclists are allowed to ride between lanes of traffic, which is terrifying.

We're southwest of the city, and the city is mostly obscured by smog (I'm guessing) when we're in view of it. Same for the mountains.  Photos like this must be taken at super close range or in much different weather conditions, because we can only make out the shapes of the mountains against the horizon and maybe the shapes of some of the buildings.

Groceries here are less expensive in some ways and more expensive in others. First, at home, I shop at Aldi, which of course is a lot less expensive than anything else. There is no Aldi here, so obviously everything's more expensive. Our first grocery stop was at a standard grocery store called Ralph's, which is related to Kroger's. I'd say it was probably on par with a Bi-Lo back home. The next grocery stop we made was Trader Joe's, and I was surprised to find that a lot of things were cheaper there than the Ralph's, since TJ's back home is marginally more expensive than the regular grocery stores. But then, in our mailbox, I got a flyer for "Sprouts Farmer's Market", which I had thought would be more expensive just judging by its name. But actually looking at the salespaper it's much cheaper than both Ralph's and Trader Joe's. I know most of you probably think this whole discussion is boring, but I think it's interesting just because all these differences in prices must have to do with differences in the way food is grown and distributed here. Here, unlike in SC, the organic, farm based option really is cheaper or equivalent to the non-organic, imported option. I guess it's because a lot of things grow in California and because a lot of people and farmers feel that organic produce is important.

Now we have a three day weekend and we're not sure what to do with it. Some of our fellow interns are going to Hollywood today sometime but were calling it quits around 1pm to watch a soccer game, so we didn't think it was worth the drive. We might get dressed and ride bikes down to Venice Beach to see what's going on there. We hear it's a really nice area.

We'll keep you posted!

Last Day of Travels: Joshua Tree National Park

Now that it's the weekend I have some time to finish up our travel documentation.

Our last day we had about five hours of driving. Because we got in bed early the night before and because we were still adjusting to time changes, we were on the road by 8AM.

There were lots of mountains. This part of the drive was in yet another desert.

We started seeing mileage signs to Los Angeles:

We actually were planning on skipping Joshua Tree National Park because we didn't have a lot of time due to all our travel delays, but we hit the exit for it right around lunchtime so we decided to have a picnic lunch there.

Because we only had a little time, we didn't actually get to drive up to the northern part of the desert where the Joshua trees are. There was road construction up that way, and we already were cutting it close to making it into LA at rush hour. The ranger recommended that we go look at an oasis where we'd find cottonwood trees that were thousands of years old.

For scale, Patrick's not even at the base of this tree:

We're definitely planning on coming back one weekend and possibly camping out for a night. The ranger said that the stars are incredible and that the Joshua trees are worth seeing.

All the other states had nice welcome centers as soon as you hit the border. California's "welcome" was an agricultural inspection station, and then 50 miles later there was a welcome center--not even on the interstate! We didn't stop at it.

And finally, finally, around 4:30, we saw the Pacific Ocean!

Thanks to everyone for all your prayers and support over our trip! It was quite a memorable adventure! And for those of you who have been biting your fingernails thinking about all our car trouble as we have journeyed, know that we are considering other options for getting back home. We'll keep you posted as we decide, but for now we're going to enjoy staying put for a while!

Day Six: Saguaro National Park in Tucson, AZ

At this point, we just gave up trying to get anywhere on the schedule we planned. We had cancelled our hotel reservation for Sunday night and decided we'd spend time in Saguaro National Park then try to get down the road.

We entered Arizona from New Mexico:

The mountains were pretty cool. They looked like a bulldozer had just pushed a whole bunch of huge rocks together in the middle of fields of sand.

Although it was quite alluring, we skipped the exit that would have allowed us to find out what "THE THING!??" was:

Saguaro National Park is divided into two districts, separated in the middle by the city of Tucson. I have a national park "passport" book that my dad bought me where you collect the stamps at the different ranger stations at national parks and national monuments, so I wanted to go to both ranger stations to get both stamps. We went to the east station first. As we approached, we started seeing the saguaro cactus.

At the east side visitor center we saw a "cactus skeleton". Apparently inside the cactus is this woody structure that supports the whole plant. The saguaro is amazing. If a bird burrows inside of the cactus it has the ability to heal itself around the bird's nest. There was also an example of where someone had stuck a bottle into the cactus (rim side first) and then broken the bottle off, then the cactus just enclosed the entire bottle rim and healed around it.

Saguaro cactus are also REALLY old:

So this guy is probably like 200 years old. How incredible. The entire cactus is covered in prickly spines. You can see at the top that it's the right season for the cactus to bloom. We saw some in bloom and many in bud. But because the cactus are so tall before they bloom, it was hard to get a good look at the blossoms.

Instead of tree forests, there are cactus forests.

It was so hot outside that the javelinas hang out in the shade of the visitor center.

Also, in all the bathrooms, there were sunscreen dispensers. That's how serious the sun is there.

We then headed to the west side of the park, on the other side of Tucson. We resisted the urge to stop and see the cross-legged Ronald McDonald...

...and drove into the cactus-filled wilderness. The road was in the middle of nowhere and was like a rollercoaster, it had so many dips!

We actually didn't end up spending much time in the west side of the park, except to take some pictures.

The park mostly offered scenic drives and backcountry camping, so instead, we went to the Sonora Desert Museum, which was actually probably my favorite part of our whole trip. It was more of a zoo/aquarium than a museum! Here are some pictures. It'd take forever for me to label all of them, so just enjoy, and let me know if you have questions about anything in the pictures.

The bird below is an American Kestrel.

These are the coolest fish I've seen in a while. They're called garden eels.

There was a hummingbird aviary:

Added bonus: we saw this little guy outside of the exhibits!

  There was also a regular aviary.

Here's what I'd look like if I were a turtle:

We watched a showdown between this bobcat and a squirrel. Nothing happened, but the bobcat was poised to attack as soon as the squirrel took one unfortunate step:

Here's a very zoomed in picture of a saguaro blossom.

This is called an organ pipe cactus:

They had a really neat geology exhibit too.

They also had bat ears for you to try on. These are proportionate to the size of a bat's body (if a bat was my size, its ears would be this big). You really could hear a lot more when you tried on the bat ears!

We decided to make it an early night and stay in Phoenix a couple hours away, since we stayed in Tucson until after 5pm. We had an awesome Greek dinner. Seriously, some of the best Greek I've ever had. 

The place we stayed in Phoenix was really nice too. We slept well.

Obviously we are a couple days behind and are trying to do the posts in order, but in case you're wondering, our first day at work was today and everything went fine! We'll write more about it later but we're looking forward to our projects and all our coworkers seem really nice, so that's good.

By the way, we're planning on keeping this blog up over the summer as well. We want to do some weekend traveling, so stay tuned even after we're done posting about the trip!