A Respite From Winter

I have always had doubts about Southern California. As a child it was great fun to go to Disneyland, visit Universal Studios, and tour Beverly Hills. As an adult though, my rare visits have more often been for business reasons which, for me at least, reduces the charm of any city I am assigned to visit.

During my years in the aerospace industry, Los Angeles was always the place you did NOT want to work. After all, it is overcrowded, expensive, polluted, and most of the potential jobs seemed to involve highly sophisticated nuclear weapon delivery systems intended to kill our "enemies" by the millions. Among my engineering peers in Seattle, moving to "LA" (pronounced with a sneer) was considered to be the last of the last resorts. Sure the weather is nice, but aren't the people shallow and self-absorbed? Isn't the traffic impossible to deal with?

After this weekend though, I find I must re-evaluate.

Since Becky is spending her last MIT IAP working at JPL during January, I took advantage of cheap post-holiday plane fares to go for a visit. I flew down Thursday night, rented a car and drove from LAX to Pasadena where I stayed with Becky in Cal Tech's Catalina Graduate Housing. The graduate housing is more like condominiums than dorm rooms. There is a living room, kitchen, bathroom, and two bedrooms with carpets and decent furniture. Much nicer than my graduate school accommodations at MIT's Ashdown House.

I woke up Friday morning to this scene (taken through the bedroom window):

After November through January in Seattle, imagine my excitement! Summer in January!
We had a rather spartan breakfast of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and then headed to a nearby Target to purchase a few necessaries for my visit (for one thing, a bath towel). Then we drove on to JPL for a personalized tour.

After a quick lunch at the cafeteria (we ate outside on a shady patio), we went to the museum with displays of full-scale and half-scale models of the many famous spacecraft designed and built at JPL. Mariner, Voyager (seen at left), Galileo, Cassini, Spirit and Opportunity, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: these were the tools we used for, in the words of Carl Sagan, "the first preliminary reconnaissance of the solar system." The sense of history was awe-inspiring. Long after our current political squabbles are forgotten, probably long after the United States itself is just a short chapter in whatever passes for history books in the distant future, the achievements of JPL will be remembered. It is a national treasure and is, of course, getting its budget cut to ensure the rich get more and more $$.

Afterwards we visited Becky's office area and the lab where she spent last summer working on adaptive optics. We finished off our tour with a visit to the MicroDevices Laboratory. An excellent time indeed.

We spent the rest of the day clearing up some financial matters and walking around the beautiful campus of Cal Tech. That evening we had dinner at an Italian restaurant in Pasadena with Becky's supervisor at JPL and his charming wife. Excellent food and wine, wide-ranging conversation with intelligent, intellectually curious, and well-informed people - that is NOT what I call a good time. I call it the best.

Saturday morning we got up early(ish) and headed for Vasquez Rocks County Park just outside the LA basin near Santa Clarita of Boston Scientific Neuro fame. We were excited to visit because of the interesting geology of the area, as well as the fascinating flora and fauna which include California Junipers, rattlesnakes, and scorpions.

Ha, not really. The fact is, we released our inner Star Trek nerds and let them out for a run. The rocks appear in no fewer that six Star Trek episodes as well as lots of other TV shows and movies. In particular, the original series episodes "Shore Leave" (Kirk's fight with his Star Trek Academy nemesis), "Arena" (remember Kirk's fight with the Gorn?), "The Alternative Factor" (the dude from an alternate universe falling off a cliff TWICE), and "Friday's Child" (Kirk and Spock kill off aliens in funny hats using bows and arrows, while McCoy slaps a pregnant woman) were filmed here. The rocks were also featured in TNG episodes "Who Watches the Watchers" (protoVulcans prone to slipping into superstition and religious fanaticism) and "Darmok" (featuring aliens who just can't come out and SAY it). It also appeared as the planet Vulcan in the movie Star Trek IV.

If you look closely at the picture at left, you may see the Gorn captain from "Arena" plying his trade.

From the rocks, we drove south to Hollywood for an excellent lunch at a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard. The sidewalks along this street, called the Walk of Fame (movie star names embedded in the sidewalk), are crowded with tourists and people bursting with the desire to take us on tours of Hollywood and/or Beverly Hills. We must have turned down 20 such offers on our way to Grauman's Chinese Theater. Here, various movie stars have immortalized themselves by sticking their hands and feet in wet concrete. We also took a tour of the theater from an English (!?) guide who showed us manikins wearing dresses from various movies and told us stories about the theater. His closest brush with stardom, he told us, was when he once swept popcorn off the floor around Julia Roberts' feet. He said it was a glamorous moment.


From Hollywood, we headed towards Santa Monica, picking up niece/cousin Katie along the way, with hopes of watching the sun set over the Pacific. We visited Katie's nice apartment and met the resident dog, Mia, who greeted us with a dignified civility. Katie then guided us to Santa Monica (it was a relief not to worry about navigation for a while), where we parked and immediately walked to the bluffs overlooking the ocean. To the left is what we saw.

Since it was evening, we were spared the hot summer sun and enjoyed the cool evening air as we strolled to the world famous Santa Monica pier (this is January, right?). The amusement park lights were coming on, the crowds were happy, and the night was beautiful. While the pier was crowded for most of its length, the person density decreased steadily as we walked, and when we arrived at the ocean end of the pier, we felt like we almost had the place to ourselves. A guitarist was playing 60s movie tunes, and we could hear the surf and the crowds on the carnival rides in the distance. There were a few boats offshore and the stars were coming out.

I began to come around to the view that Southern California has its good points.

We tore ourselves away from this peaceful scene, strolled through the pedestrian mall in downtown Santa Monica, and had an excellent dinner of pizza and calzones. Then we took Katie home and went back to Pasadena.

The next day, Sunday, I reluctantly parted with Becky (we won't see her again until June), drove back to the airport and found the rather obscurely placed car return area without major incident. I was relieved that the most stressful part of the journey was over. Or was it?

I arrived back at SeaTac to a rather nasty looking snow storm. However, I made it home safely but couldn't help but to contrast the scene at home with the previous evening in Santa Clara.

So now I'm a California Dreamer. (Which, by the way, is another Star Trek connection. One of the Mamas, Michelle Phillips, was Captain Picard's love interest in "We'll Always Have Paris.")