Friday, July 10, 2015

Road trip: Up the California Coast

Yesterday was the last leg of our trip: LA to San Francisco. We drove about halfway, then took a detour to check out Hearst Castle. It was pretty nuts - here's one of the guest "cottages":
The estate is so huge you can really only see part of it in a day - we did a tour of the "grand rooms" of the main house, which is 68,500 square feet and has 115 rooms in all (we only saw the big entertaining rooms on the ground floor). I didn't realize that Hearst imported so much of the place from ancient European castles, monasteries, etc... For example, all the rooms we saw had ceilings that were taken from 15th-16th century European buildings, cleaned up by Hearst, and then installed in his home. Here are a few:


There was also a ton of ancient art, like the remains of this 2,000+ year old Greek statue:
The limbs and head may be gone, but the most important organ remains.
It was kind of funny though, because in the midst of all the antiquities would be some "contemporary" items that looked out of place, like these very 1950s chairs:

After the official tour you are free to wander the grounds, which are beautiful and overlook the ocean.
Usually the Neptune Pool is a main attraction, but due to the drought it was empty and looked considerably less cool. The indoor Roman pool was still filled though, and it was the most gorgeous part of the whole estate. It's covered entirely in blue glass and gold tiles - I've never seen anything like it before.
Gold tiles on the floor
Sooooooo prettyyyyyyyy
Gold tiles under the water
Also, I didn't realize that Hearst built the castle in the middle of what had been his family's ranch, so you go through all this ranch land to get there and pass an odd assortment of herds of cattle and random other animals descended from the occupants of the zoo Hearst used to keep there. Apparently there are several herds of zebra roaming around - we didn't see them, but we did see a lot of these guys:
After the castle, we drove the rest of the way up Route 1 instead of the main highway, since it takes you along the coastline and is beautiful. The whole drive is gorgeous - you have the ocean on one side and mountains on the other, and it seems like every time you round a corner you come across a sweeping vista more beautiful than the last. We stopped a few times to take photos, but if we had stopped as often as we thought about it, we probably would still be inching our way up the coast.
We finally made it to San Francisco last night, thus bringing a great road trip to an end. Ben actually left for a conference in Rome today, and he'll come back and start his new job next week. I'll spend the weekend getting settled in, and go back to work on Monday. All told we drove 3,700+ miles (not including driving within each city or our little 450 mile day trip to the Grand Canyon) in 18 days, ate an unknowable number of calories, carbs, and everything else  that's bad for you, and had a fantastic time.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Road Trip: LA

When we got into LA last night the first thing we did was have dinner with a bunch of our friends here, who proceeded to spend the meal collectively planning our agenda for today. The result was a haphazard yet awesome assortment of LA things that took us all over the city. We started in Manhattan Beach, where we got breakfast at a great pancake house and then spent a long time walking it off along the beach.
Ben on the pier.
We had fun walking on the sand and ogling the ridiculously large beach houses that people have. A lot of them are set up so you can see in to their first floor and admire their beautiful interiors as well as their size and fancy exteriors. The only people we saw actually in any of them were cleaning staff.
Those are individual homes, not apartment buildings or hotels.
Next we drove to Bell for lunch, and had our first experience with cochinita pibil - oh my god I don't know where this dish has been all my life, it is SO GOOD!
I don't yet know what is about to happen
THIS IS WHAT IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN
Lunch was followed by a CHURRO ICE CREAM SANDWICH - as in, they fry two fresh churros, coil them into discs, put a scoop of ice cream in the middle, and hand it to you like it's no big deal when in reality it is the physical incarnation of the meaning of life.
MY FINGERS ARE BURNING AND I DON'T CARE
We were both ready for a walk after that afternoon feast, so next we went to Griffith Park and walked around. We went to the observatory, which has a small free museum about space and a telescope you can look at, as well as a really cool rotating camera obscura of the LA skyline. Plus, you can stand on top and take your picture with the Hollywood sign in the background.
It's small, but it's there!
From the park we went to the La Brea Tar Pits, which look cool but smell awful. Also, they have statues of animals being trapped in the pits, which seemed kind of morbid.
Ben is happy that elephant is dying in front of its mate and child!
We finished the day off with a lowkey sushi dinner and more time hanging out with friends. I will leave you with this store we passed in our wanderings today:
I don't know which part of this store being called VAG I like better - that it's a meat market, or that it has Jesus on it.

Monday, July 6, 2015

Road Trip: Phoenix

Well, technically we are in Phoenix today, but it is a million degrees here and even our host said that the best thing to do in Phoenix in the summer is go away, so we decided to drive to the Grand Canyon! It's three and a half hours each way, but neither of us had ever been and we didn't know when we'd have the opportunity again, so we figured we might as well go for it. It was totally worth it! It's hard to convey the scope and beauty in snapshots, but we did take a few. See if you can tell the difference between the first two pictures we took there:

If you guessed that while brushing those stray hairs out of my face I knocked my sunglasses off my head and into the canyon, you were right! They were cheap sunglasses so I'm not upset that they're lost, but I feel very guilty for littering in a national park.

We took a bunch of pictures as we walked around because everything was so gorgeous, but they all sort of look the same after a while, once we stopped losing accessories into the canyon.
Ben did take a cool panoramic shot with his phone, though:
Click to embiggen
Also, they really don't want you to feed the wildlife there, which is understandable, but this sign basically says that if you feed the squirrels you will contract the plague, and that seems a bit severe.
We're back in Phoenix and will spend the evening hanging out with our friend, before heading off to LA  tomorrow!

Sunday, July 5, 2015

Road Trip: Driving through NM and AZ

I know I've been posting only about our destinations so far, but today's drive from Gallup to Phoenix was so beautiful we had to take pictures. Instead of going the direct way on the main interstate highway, we took a slightly less direct route that went through the Pueblo of Zuni in New Mexico, the Fort Apache Reservation in Arizona, the Tonto National Forest, and lots of gorgeous scenery in between.
Dowa Yalanne outside the Pueblo
The Zuni Pueblo itself is also very picturesque - lots of adobe houses and hornos - but no photos are allowed without a permit.
Pretty driving

More pretty driving
Different type of pretty driving
A lot of the scenery seemed quite similar to Colorado, where we've spent a decent amount of time, but the redness of the rocks and the presence of cacti made it clear we were in the Southwest.
Little cactus
Big cacti
We mostly took pictures as we drove, but we did pull over once to stretch, and for Ben to climb on things.
 Now we are in Phoenix, and there are cacti everywhere, including this giant one in our friend's yard:
Now we are here and about to have dinner, and we have all day tomorrow to explore!

Saturday, July 4, 2015

Road Trip: Gallup

The drive from Austin to Gallup took most of Friday, but at our Gallup friend's recommendation we stopped in Albuquerque for dinner at El Pinto. We thought it was just a good restaurant she liked, but upon arriving we realized it's actually a giant old hacienda/garden complex that is a Big Deal. Inside they had pictures of all kinds of celebrities, politicians, and presidents that had eaten there.
Grand entrance
The food was excellent:
Those sopapillas, though. Wow.
We got into Gallup late so went straight to bed. This morning we started with breakfast at The Plaza Cafe, which is in a double wide trailer on the old Route 66. My friend has been telling me forever that they make the best french toast in the world, and she was not kidding:
Seriously, I would come back here just for that french toast.
We then walked around the Gallup flea market for a while, which is enormous and sprawling and has people selling everything from livestock to Navajo pottery and jewelry to tires to mattresses, and pretty much everything in between. I didn't take any pictures, but I did get some really excellent horchata. I also think I saw more Native people in that hour at the flea market than I have seen in my entire life up to today, which is pretty messed up.


According to our friend, ordinarily hiking would have been next on the agenda, but it was way too hot today so we just drove out to the red rocks and took some pictures with them.
Yes, weather is totally the reason I didn't climb up there.
So pretty
We then had a driving tour of Gallup, which most notably included the historic El Rancho Hotel, where lots of movie stars used to stay when they came out to NM to film Westerns. All the rooms are named after a celebrity who stayed there, but we only recognized a small number of the names, which I guess is kinda depressing for those (former) celebrities. Also, they had a bunch of pictures from the sets of movies that were shot in/around the hotel, including many with white actors in red face. Gross.
"Charm of yesterday, convenience of tomorrow" - I don't think historical racism is charming, and they don't even have today's convenience of wifi, so I am skeptical of their motto.
The lobby looks pretty much like I assume it did when it opened in 1937.
We spent the rest of the day preparing for and then having a 4th of July barbecue. The 4th of July here is nuts - Gallup was recently voted the most patriotic small town in America, and man do they show it, at least when it comes to fireworks. As soon as it got dark there were a TON of them going off everywhere, for hours - our friend lives on a hill so we had a great view as we ate and hung out all night. It was crazy because it seemed like everyone in town was setting off professional grade fireworks from their yards - some from her neighbors seemed like they were right on top of us. They are still going off sporadically as I write this. It's interesting that there is such strong patriotism in a town that is nearly half Native and a third Latino, given that neither group is typically depicted as being as "real" Americans as White people. I learned from my friend that Native people actually have the highest per-capita enlistment in the military of any ethnicity, which is also something that you don't typically hear about.

And on that note... happy independence* day!

* For straight, white, cis, able-bodied, neurotypical, educated, property-owning, Christian, English men, that is.

Thursday, July 2, 2015

Road Trip: Austin

We arrived in Austin Wednesday night and immediately devoured a giant pile of barbecue - it was delicious, too much so for us to pause and photograph it before diving in. We spent today driving around the city with our friend and her adorable baby - we started with fancy coffee, then walked around Barton Springs to cool off.
 We had our first Sonic experience:
Ben showing off his (not very) blue tongue.
Delicious tacos for lunch:
 Followed by also delicious cookies at Sweetish Hill Bakery:
That cookie is shaped like Texas!
We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering in/around the Texas statehouse. We learned that they are only in session a few months every other year (crazy!), and also that they have really sweet hinges on all their doors:

I told Ben to "look legislative"

I disapprove of the 10 Commandments on government property.
We finished the day off with watching a bike race, eating pizza, and lots of baby ogling. Tomorrow is the longest driving day of the whole trip (~13 hours), so it's early to bed for an early start first thing in the morning!