Thanksgiving in L.A.
As most Americans make their way to a family gathering this weekend to celebrate Thanksgiving, we decided to take our first road-trip. Long weekends are rare in the American work calendar, and a four-day weekend is exceptional.
L.A. was a natural choice. We spent last Christmas at Hearst Castle and G was well behaved. We felt it was time to be a little more adventurous, so we drove the 350 miles or so south to Los Angeles - the largest metropolis in the US. To avoid other travellers, we took a longer route via Highway 101 that brought us through several of California’s quiet towns on the Central Coast - San Luis Obispo, Solvang and Santa Barbara.
Solvang was probably the most interesting. Founded by Danish academics at the start of the 20th century, they built a town that looked almost like a village transplanted from Denmark. The town was lined with quiant shops and windmills with bakeries serving Danish pastries - except that they were mostly shut on Thanksgiving itself. The streets were lined with tourists and there was no shortage of picture-taking opportunities.
In L.A. proper, there was no shortage of things to do. This was one of the cities that you felt you almost knew. The scenes from movies and TV shows have left a subconcious imprint that spelt “Santa Monica pier”, “Beverly Hills” and other countless familiar names.
On Friday, we visited Santa Monica’s Pacific Park, which was built on a pier leading out over the wide beaches where California met the ocean. If it was anything the Bay Area lacked that Southern California had in abundance was the beaches - miles and miles of prime ocean front lined with palm trees.
Next to Santa Monica was the affluent city of Beverly Hills. Huge, expansive mansions lie next to the designer boutiques of Rodeo Drive. The most expensive homes were higher on the hill, where they overlooked the Los Angeles cityscape and the Pacific ocean. One of those was Greystone Mansion which was now a public park with ornate gardens and Roman columns and fountains.
The last location on Friday was Griffith Observatory, perched on a hill with spectacular views of the valley. There, we watched the full moon rise above the San Gabriel mountains and watched the sun set slowly over the Pacific. Our visit could not have been more perfectly timed.
Today, we visited the Getty Centre a museum set on 750 acres of land on the Santa Monica hills. Funded by the Getty Trust, this private institution was opened only ten years ago, and now draws quite a crowd of visitors. It had seven levels of underground parking which are filled by the afternoon, and electric trams ferry visitors from the gatehouse up to the museum. The museum building itself presented a strong contrast of stone and steel, squares and circles with breathtaking views of the city as the backdrop. The museum boasts a wide collection of artwork - one of the finest in the West Coast.
Tomorrow is the last day of the weekend, and we plan to attend Mass at one of the California Missions (either San Gabriel or San Fernando) and head home, hopefully avoiding the Thanksgiving traffic.