Hitting LA

What an interesting day! Today we hit LA.

We decided early on to go to the Griffith Park Observatory. We booked our tickets on line but there wasn't any way we could print the tickets but lucky us. I asked the man at the desk if he could print them for us and he did – excellent Best Western Casablanca in San Clemente. This has to be one of the best hotels we stayed in.

We headed north on 101 passing through Orange County. We stopped off at Laguna Beach and walked along the beach and into downtown Laguna. We watched surfers and bathers; families on the beach all under the bright blue sky and the crashing surf of the Pacific Ocean. I drove on up 101 all along the road where, in Easter2006, we had driven in torrential rain and deserted roads. Now it was brilliant sunshine and busy roads. As we reached the LA conurbation we pulled off and decided to go directly to the observatory since our tickets were for 3pm and it was now 1.30pm. We had planned to go to the hotel, book in and then go to the observatory.

I reprogrammed the ipaq satnav itinerary to take us by the quickest route and off we headed. Up onto I405 and the traffic was much denser than we had encountered before, which we didn't mind as it was quite speedy. It was when it all started to slow that the delays were anxiety inducing. The satnav took us on a route that I wouldn't have done if I had time to plan it better. We swung up through East LA(!) and on, what to my way of thinking, was a round about way of doing it. One thing that it did do though was to take around the one rotary, roundabout, in LA.

We made the parking lot for the observatory shuttle with 15 minutes to spare because of the heavy and slow moving traffic.

We took the shuttle up and for the next four hours we were fascinated, educated and entranced by the observatory. Initially it didn't look as if there had been anything done to it other than a tidy and clean up. Once inside it became apparent that big changes had happened since I was last there in 1999. The front lawn had been removed, the whole of the observatory had been dug under, underpinned with hydraulic jacks and new theatres and exhibition halls built under and in front of it. The exhibitions were really good explaining about space and the universe. We went to the planetarium show and it was highly impressive. The delivery was a live speaker and the projections here very cleverly done taking us on a journey through time. The whole thing was exceedingly professionally delivered. The effect of moving through space and was very cleverly done; real state of the art stuff.

After that we went around the new exhibition halls which were equally impressive and into the Leonard Nimoy(!) theatre where we watched a film, narrated by the man himself, explaining about the refit.

The views of the LA conurbation were amazingly good. The smog didn't seem to be as bad when I was here in 1999 or in 2002. Today was really bright and sunny which should have made the smog quite bad. The view of LA itself was much clearer than before although it's easy to see the brown smog layer.

We went to the cafe and had a very reasonably priced meal. As it was getting rather late we caught the shuttle back to the entrance. As we headed back to the car I turned on my ipaq to start up the satnav and as it started up it told me what direction to take. An American woman nearby was quite surprised that there were such things as portable satnavs that spoke! I was very tempted to say that everyone in the UK had such things!

We thought that it would be a good idea to take the shortest route to the hotel in Santa Monica. My idea of the shortest route and the satnav's idea are two quite different things. Mine is sticking to main roads and simple directions; the programmers' idea is to take as many dark, dubious and obscure roads as possible or so it seems. We had to drive through some very strange parts; taking odd turnings and managing to ignore the satnav commands quite easily on the crowded streets of LA. We did go along Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards until we suddenly found ourselves on Santa Monica Boulevard. All this was done in the dark, speeding, crowded traffic. The traffic thinned out and then looming out of the dark we could see the Best Western sign! We pulled in, registered, parked and sorted ourselves out.

Tomorrow it's up to the Getty and the La Brea Tar Pits.