Day 1 Photos

We're safe in our hotel near Arches National Park! Here are just a few photos from our first day's travels (Saturday). I'll keep it short because I'm sleepy!

On our way out of LA we drove by Watts Towers because we wanted to see it and never got the chance. But it was super cool, so I'm glad we did.

This set us behind by an hour or so. I'm not sure whether it was a controlled burn or an accidental fire, but they had blocked a portion of the interstate to put it out.

Driving through the Mojave we got to see some Joshua trees, which I was super excited about since we didn't get to see them at Joshua Tree National Park.

This means we're close to home, right?! (For those unfamiliar, Clemson's stadium is nicknamed Death Valley.)

Nevada had a boring state line sign.

This is Lake Mead, which the Hoover Dam created.

Here's the power plant in the Hoover Dam, about 50 stories below its top.

Here are some more Hoover Dam pictures:

We drove through a few miles of Las Vegas just to say we had been.

The sunset was pretty in the Nevada desert.

This is my attempt at taking a picture of the Utah state line sign. It was too dark.

Hopefully I'll have time tomorrow to post our pictures from Zion National Park today!

Safe in Utah!

...but very sleepy! We were up late last night and up early this morning packing, and thanks to LA traffic the driving time was longer than we expected. Today was our longest driving day besides the one we go through Kansas.

Tomorrow you can look forward to pictures from:

- Hoover Dam

- Watts Towers

- Lake Mead

- Las Vegas

Until then, good night!

Weeks 10: San Diego (again)

I've been working on this post for a few days but as I write, we'll be leaving on our cross-country journey in about an hour! Patrick is still asleep so I'm letting him get as much rest as possible before we embark. Week 11 will have to wait--we'll try to keep daily updates for the trip back home then catch up on the rest of our LA posts when we get back.

Patrick spent most of week 10 weeding through dealer e-mails to find the best price. We finally settled on a dealer in San Diego, which is about two hours away. It was a bit of a drive but the price savings were significant, between what the dealer offered and the lower tax rate in that particular city.

Because we were planning on trading in Patrick's car, we took it to a car wash--in particular, the El Segundo Car Wash. This was the best car wash experience ever. In addition to a squeaky-clean car, we got to enjoy the statues within the car wash, and the colored soap and scrubbies. It was our source of entertainment for the evening. Seriously. If you're ever in El Segundo, do it.

We got Patrick's car appraised at CarMax and made the happy discovery of Randy's Donuts, a LA landmark. At the cashier's suggestion, I tried the buttermilk doughnut. Now, typically, I am a Krispy Kreme loyalist, but this doughnut was on par with Krispy Kreme, although completely different. It was like someone had taken buttermilk biscuit dough, deep fried it, and glazed it. It is one of the most delicious things I have ever had. If I thought they could be preserved for a week, I would bring several dozen home. So good.

We had planned to go to San Diego early on Saturday morning, but by sheer luck, our company had reserved a hotel room in San Diego that no one was staying in, and at 7PM on a Friday, our project assistant called and offered it to us for free! The person had canceled last minute and they couldn't get the money back, so it was going to go empty without us. Although it was late, we decided to take the adventure. We thoroughly enjoyed the night's sleep in a plushy bed with air conditioning.

That morning came the saga of the screwdriver. We needed to transfer our SC plates to the new car, but after we had driven it off the lot due to the fun combination of CA and SC laws. Luckily there was a Target near where we were staying. Unluckily, they did not sell one single Philips head screwdriver! (They had fancy ones with changing bits.) We were unwilling to spend $10 for a one-time use screwdriver since we have a billion at home. Luckily Patrick found one in the dollar section. Cost us $3, but at least that's better than $10.

We then bought our car (as previously blogged). This took four hours for no good reason. We were hungry and grumpy by the end. So we headed in to town to enjoy a Panera Bread picnic. It was nice to sit in a grassy courtyard and enjoy our sandwiches (grass is a rarity here).

When we visited San Diego over Independence Day, our Seaworld ticket was valid for a free second visit that we didn't use. So we decided to spend the remainder of our afternoon in Seaworld! For the record, to really enjoy the park, go ahead and take the two days--we hit most of what we wanted to do the first day, but were exhausted afterwards, and the second day gave us time to do a couple things that we missed. In retrospect we probably should have just spent two shorter days.

We finished up our evening with dinner in San Diego at Pho Point Loma, which was delicious, probably some of the best pho we've had. We also tried the Vietnamese iced coffee which was made with condensed milk. This is what Frappuccinos dream of being.

All right, off to packing our last few things!

Weeks 8 & 9: Hollywood & Mitsuwa Marketplace

Pretty soon we'll have an east-to-west adventure to write about so I figured I better catch up on what we've been doing the past few weeks! Time has truly flown.

Week 8
Because everyone would ask about it, we finally made the trek to the Hollywood sign. We went via Mulholland Drive, which is a scenic highway in the Santa Monica Mountains, which run kind of through the middle of the city. It was pretty, in its own California kind of way.

In this picture you can see WB Studios, and I think Disney studios too.

This sign informed us that there is no good reason for people to settle in LA. (I think we already knew that. No offense, citizens of LA.)

The sun is in Patrick's eyes but waaaayyy back behind him you can see the skyline of the city proper.

Note the haze/smog. It's like this all the time.

Here is the Goodyear blimp:

Then we headed to the Hollywood Reservoir. We were going to hike around it, but it actually wasn't that pretty because the reservoir is fenced in. It was cool to see the dam.

And then we finally made it to the Hollywood sign.

It is very hot and dry inland. Where we live on the shore, the wind keeps it cool, but as soon as you go a couple miles inland, the temperature rises fifteen degrees. It never rains here. I think I've seen actual rain once this summer.

Here are some pictures of "downtown" Hollywood. We were underwhelmed, so we just drove through.

After this we had dinner in Thai Town at Pa Ord Noodle. Patrick had a super-authentic dish called boat noodles. It tasted kind of like a weirdly spiced pot roast with noodles.

To finish our evening, we headed to Griffith Observatory, which was probably one of my favorite experiences here. Believe it or not, you can see the stars up here! 

The exhibits were really cool, but my camera's not awesome in low light so I don't have many pictures. One of the coolest things we did was watch the sunset through a pinhole camera, and we were able to witness the phenomenon of a green flash. Because green light bends differently than other light, you can see this little tiny green 'spark' at the top of the sun. It was also a special weekend where amateur astronomers brought their telescopes out to share with everyone. We got to see Saturn through the telescope and we could see the rings on it! That was so awesome. It looked just like it does in the textbooks.

Oh. Here's Patrick hanging out with Einstein at the observatory.

Week 9

We went to test drive a Mazda in the Torrance area on Saturday...not too exciting. What was exciting is that we found a Chick-fil-a and I convinced Patrick to let us eat lunch there. Mmmm. Delicious taste of home. Then we went to Sam's Club and spent the rest of the day laying around and being lazy.

On Sunday, we had the special treat of meeting up with my Aunt Sheila for dinner! Unfortunately I was dumb and forgot my camera, but at least Patrick captured the moment on his phone. 

We went to Mitsuwa Marketplace, which is a Japanese supermarket, and we ate at Santouka Ramen, which, yes, serves ramen noodles. It was delicious--dissimilar in many ways to the instant ramen. It was served with a few thin slices of pork. We opted for the combo, which also had pork fried rice and a boiled egg. After we ate, we spent some time walking around the shops, which was interesting.

Hopefully I'll get to weeks 10 and 11 tomorrow!