Saturday morning we were watching Elizabethtown, a Cameron Crowe film starring Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, and Susan Sarandon (who my dad says he had a date with in middle school, but he had no idea she was "that girl" until maybe 5 years ago). Anyway, towards the end of the film Bloom's character drives across America scattering his dad's ashes in various places. Amelie was watching with us and first we had to explain cremation. We related it to our dearly departed cat, Mookie, who sits, cremated, on a shelf in our house, and has for um, 4 years now. We discussed scattering those ashes, but that would just make the house (more) dusty with cat cremains so we offered a funeral. So she cried, briefly, over missing Mookie. Then, there was a scene where he visits the scene of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination in Memphis. Amelie was very upset to learn that Dr. King was assassinated (and what that even meant). When I considered the appropriateness of our viewing choices that morning, I wasn't really considering the consequences of having to discuss these life issues with a just-turned-5-year-old. So, she cried about that, too, briefly (and I am really not sure how sincerely, she is sooo dramatic sometimes, honestly), and for the next four hours we were fielding questions on the mechanics of the assasination (I had to quickly google to get James Earl Ray's name on my phone at lunch, I admit, but I am LOUSY with names).
Lunch was in NoHo, L.A.-speak for North Hollywood. We trekked up there to check out North Hollywood Scooters, one of the better scooter shops in the country, as the industry mags report it. Nice people, low-key operation. Then, we drove around for a few blocks, saw the liquor store where Cher was mugged in Clueless (NoHo is actually in the Valley), and stopped at Pit Fired Pizza, which was decent.
After that, we toured back into Hollywood and decided to cruise a bit of the famous Mulholland Drive. In retrospect, I was wishing I had a $6 star map, it would have added to the interest a bit. We drove the non-Beverly Hills section (Laurel Cyn to the 101), so it was a bit less intensely populated with the homes of the famous. We did get a nice view of the Hollywood sign which was across the 101 and up another hill from where we were at.
Since we were doing the whole tourist thing that day, we headed to Universal CityWalk, which is like the Universal Studios version of Downtown Disney. At least at DD you can park for 3 hours free and then validate after that. Here it was $10 to park, at a MALL, and the only validation was if you were there for a movie. So lame. We ate at Wolfgang Puck's (it sounds so fancy - it's not, really). Then got ourselves back to the relative quiet of the South Bay.
Do I even need to mention how traffic sucked? By L.A. standards it surely could have been worse - they had the I-5 closed down that weekend, I read about a family that had to wait that out near Anaheim, and the accident was in Santa Clarita by Magic Mountain. If you have ever been there you know these two places are in separate counties. They were parked on the freeway for 5 hours, in the middle of the night. Good god. Living in this place is so not for me.
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