Chapter 2
Do You Know the Way to Santa Monica?

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(Originally posted September 15, 2012)

Getting out of LAX and meeting up with Tracy’s brother Steve didn’t exactly prove to be the easiest airport meet-up.

After deplaning, we noticed we were the only JetBlue flight amongst a slew of Alaskan Air gates, so at least we knew to tell Steve to meet us in the Alaskan Air area. Unfortunately, LAX was under pretty heavy construction, so for us to get to street level to meet up with him involved going up and down several flights of stairs just to avoid the areas of the airport that were torn up for remodeling. At one point we ended up on a bridge going somewhere, but decided not to cross it.

Ironically, on Steve’s end, it must have been pretty easy to find us. Once we told him we were in the Alaskan Air terminal and waiting outside the Virgin Airlines signs, he seemed to know exactly where to go. Within minutes of finally finding our way outside, he pulled up in his car. We piled in and got going quickly because airport security at LAX does NOT want you to idle.

Steve had been waiting in a parking lot just outside the airport and had actually seen us land. Apparently there are only one or two JetBlue flights into LAX per day, so when he saw a JetBlue plane coming in, he knew it was us!

We quickly caught up on all of our lives and told him about our flying adventures, but before we knew it, we were at the restaurant we were going to for lunch. What restaurant, you may ask. Well of course, we had to patronize one of California’s most famous establishments—In-N-Out Burger.

I hadn’t been to an In-N-Out since I was in seventh grade and went to Las Vegas for a class trip. Tracy had been more recently, but it had still been quite a while. I’m a BIG burger fan. Burgers have always been among my favorite foods, and we made sure to seek out the burger joints with the best reputations while living in NYC. Still, In-N-Out has its reputation for a reason, and they cook up a mean burger. Steve and I each ordered Double-Doubles and Tracy had a cheeseburger. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to snap any pictures of the meaty goodness before we dug in. It was as delicious as I was hoping it would be. The fries were really good too! Once we move to CA, I’m excited to try out some of the items on the “secret menu,” but for now, good old-fashioned burgers were just what our stomachs were ordering. It wasn’t even quite noon yet, but since that was 3:00 our time and we had been up for almost twelve hours already, we were HUNGRY.

After quickly putting away our lunches, we tried to come up with a plan for the rest of this day. As I said, we didn’t have park tickets for this first day, so we weren’t in too big of a hurry to get to Anaheim. We decided to explore some of the sights of L.A. instead.

Our first stop was just around the corner from In-N-Out.

We had to go to CVS to replace our confiscated toothpaste.

Here was our first palm tree sighting (of many) in the CVS parking lot.

There was also a hawk up above making lazy circles in the sky.

After we had made our purchase and were on our way, I let my complete ignorance about the L.A. area begin to show.

As I noted, my last (and only) trip to Disneyland was when I was five years old. That was also my only trip to California except for senior year of high school when I flew out for one night for an a cappella singing competition. On that occasion, we arrived late one night, went to USC where the competition was being held the next morning, and flew out that evening. Needless to say, I didn’t get much of a flavor of SoCal. Therefore, I simply didn’t really understand the layout of L.A., and when Tracy suggested that one of our stops on our day of exploration be Santa Monica, I pictured it being some city outside of L.A., at least an hour away.

Instead, it was only a couple miles! On the way there we got our first taste of L.A. traffic. The traffic on the surface streets wasn’t really what I was picturing when I thought of a trafficky area. It’s not like you’re ever really stopped bumper to bumper. Instead, you just move pretty slowly because only a certain number of people make each traffic light. And there are a lot of traffic lights.

When we arrived in Santa Monica, we parked near the Third Street Promenade but started walking toward the boardwalk. We quickly got our first view of the ocean.

It was hard to believe we had caught a sight of the Atlantic early that morning and now here we were at the Pacific. The speed of air travel is really amazing when you think about it!

Even before you make the long descent toward the boardwalk, the park up above is really pretty.

Eventually, we found the best point of descent and made our way down the many stairs toward the Santa Monica Pier.

As we arrived on the pier, we saw this mural promoting the Santa Monica Aquarium. We liked this seal.

Heading out onto the pier, it was fun to see just how campy and old-timey it is.

We could see lots of great views of both the ocean and the mountains. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen those two geological features so close before!

We stopped to admire some of the colorful characters lining the pier as well as all the dogs! It was a fun place to just hang out for a few minutes.

We decided to take a couple family pictures, if only as proof for our families that we had met up. First we tried a threesome self-take.

Then we nixed that idea and just asked someone to take our picture for us.

Before turning back, we walked right up to the end of the pier and looked out. There were some people parasailing pretty far out in the background.

I stopped at one of the little gift shops along the pier to see if they had a Santa Monica thimble. Back in high school, I started a thimble collection as a set of souvenirs that were relatively small and could be gotten at all the places I visit. Luckily the little shop had one! Unfortunately, all the thimbles are currently in the storage unit with the rest of our worldly possessions, so I can’t post a picture…

We turned back and started walking along the other side of the pier. We saw the famous Ferris wheel doing its thing.

One of these hotels in the distance is the one that Tracy’s family stayed at when they did a vacation to Santa Monica when she was in high school.

At the time, I barely could picture where she was vacationing, but now I was finally able to put a visual to the name Santa Monica!

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