Click on photo to enlarge
Oh, my, how we long for the days of
Echo Park, of
Silverlake, of
brightly-colored murals and bodegas and people walking the streets.
How we pine for the weird streets of Hollywood, the trendy folk
thronging the sidewalks of
the Strip. When you get right down to it,
Sunset Boulevard stops being a great walk at the
Luckman Building,
9200 Sunset, at the border with Beverly Hills. It's still a great
drive; as you whisk through the green walls and glimpse the
multi-million-dollar mansions you find yourself wondering "Who
are these people? Where did they get all this stuff?
How can there be so many of them, able to live in places like this?"
Miles and miles and miles of money, money almost cascading out into
the streets.
But
Beverly Hills is boring to walk through. One hour and you've
seen it all.
Bel-Air is even worse.
Brentwood is no better, and here
we come to
Pacific Palisades ...
Remember, in
installment one, I likened our trip to
Bill Bryson's
attempt to hike the
Appalachian Trail? He ended up doing only about
a third of it. We've done better than that, but here at the end
we've had to skip ... and in a few places we just plain ol'
decided to skip. You'll see on the map that we've skipped
about 3 miles since the last walk. Technically, there are some
sidewalks, or at least a few narrow paths, where we could
have walked. It would have involved hunting up a parking spot in
places hostile to strange cars, walking .2 miles out and .2 miles
back, then moving the car, walking .4 or .3 miles, and back. So when
we got to the ocean we could say "Well, we walked every place there
was a sidewalk!"
You know what? Screw that. It becomes self-punishment, like the guys
who keep on going up
Everest when their toes are falling off from
frostbite.
... well, maybe not that bad, but we set out to have fun,
and these last miles, quite simply, are not. So we have found this
little one-mile stretch of Pacific Palisades that at least resembles
a neighborhood, though with nothing like the vitality and energy and
excitement of the eastern blocks of Sunset, and this will be our
last trek until we reach the half-mile of walkable street from the
Pacific Coast Highway up the hill to ... but I'll save that, as it's
something pretty special.
You may remember I said that Bill Bryson spent most of his trip
terrified of bears, and that I said we didn't expect any trouble
from bears. Well, we didn't have any trouble, but we did see one. It
was the UCLA Bruin, outside Pauley Pavilion. We've got a picture of
it somewhere, if Lee can dig it out ...
ê ê ê
You want to know just how boring Pacific Palisades is? Lee took 15
pictures. You may not realize how stunning that is until I tell you
that, on a typical walk, she takes between 75 and 150 pictures.
Let me say that again. Lee took 15 pictures!
There are neat homes. (We're tired of neat homes.) There is
something so many Los Angeles neighborhoods have: a Village. (A dull
village) Los Feliz Village, Brentwood Village; we must have passed
half a dozen of them on this trip. I don't know if they used to be
actual downtowns before LA became a metroplex with few discernible
borders, or if they only grew up because they were zoned for
business. Some are livelier than others, and the rule of thumb is,
the farther west you go, the less lively.
We stopped on the way back to the car at a little
organic/Californian/Mexican/whatever cafe and I had a steak and
portobello mushroom quesadilla that was to die for. Then we went
home.
End of Pacific Palisades.
May 26, 2006