My trip to L.A.
I felt I was getting stale in Palo Alto and decided to have a weekend in L.A. Rhonda and Natalie from Origami have moved there and I also wanted to meet Dmitri Williams of UCS and Tom Boellstorff of UC Irvine while I was in the US. When you’ve come all the way from Australia to Palo Alto, Los Angeles seems like I quick trip down the road. I wanted to drive there, for the practice, and so I could get around LA. I picked a weekend that seemed free (getting that badly wrong – ’twas the weekend before paper deadline), booked Saturday night at Santa Barbara and Sunday night at Westwood, teed up dinners and coffees, rented a car and headed off on Saturday morning.
The drive to Santa Barbara was mostly uneventful, just a long hot drive through the desert. Of the three routes you can take I chose highway 101, a large eight lane highway like the Hume. It was a compromise between the fast but apparently relentlessly straight 5 and the long coastal 1.
I stopped at San Miguel, a historic town with ruins of an old Spanish mission. Every town in California seems to have a “Mission street” or “Mission district”, usually the oldest part, dating from the Spanish religious missions that began European settlement here. There is one in Santa Barbara too.
After going through the desert most of the way the 101 reaches the ocean at Pismo Beach, where I stopped for cool air. There is about 5 or 10 miles of little beach towns, a bit like Victoria’s Great Ocean Road. I wanted to take highway 1 from here to SB but got lost around Orcutt, got gas at Los Alamos, and got back on the 101 and drove to Santa Barbara.
Expecting SB to be a small town and knowing there is a famous university campus near the water, I pulled off 101 at a randomly-selected exit, drove for a while towards the beach and asked some passers-by “am I near USCB?”, to find out I’d passed it 10 miles back. So I drove off in another random direction to find my motel. Random driving doesn’t work in big towns. By the time I found the motel a niggling car problem from the afternoon was happening more frequently and I decided to call roadside care about it before driving more. A warning light was flashing “service airbag”. I figured this could mean two things – either the bag is broken and won’t inflate if I crash (not too worried), or it might inflate while I’m driving down the highway at 60 mph (instant death). I ended up having to drive to the SB airport, where luckily my rental firm has an office, to swap the car there.
Next morning I drove back to UCSB for a better look. Apart from being 5 miles out of Santa Barbara proper this is about the best campus location you can imagine. They are right on the beach – I mean as in walk out of the lecture theatre into the surf. Marine sciences are well represented. Tooby and Cosmides, inventors of evolutionary psychology, work here.
Next stop was Ventura Beach, where I found a good cafe and walked on the sand for a bit. From here I had another go at taking the old coastal highway 1, because I could find my LA hotel easily by taking a left at Santa Monica, a beach suburb that I know. But I got lost a second time and ended up back on the 101 at Camarillo. The freeway gets pretty crazy from here to LA – 8 to 10 lanes of fast moving traffic, like a giant flooded river of cars, going through spectacular mountains. It eventually gets in amongst the upscale “valley” region of LA, though unfortunately you don’t see much from the freeway. I took a right at the 405 and drove south to Westwood near UCLA, where my hotel was. The 405 is another magnificent freeway that goes over the top of the Hollywood Hills, past the Getty Center on a mountain and downhill into LA proper.
I was surprised how easily I could find my way around West LA, my sole experience of it being a tourist bus tour a year and a half ago. I went for a drive around Sunset Boulevard and Beverly Hills. I checked out the 405 south and started getting a “check engine” light on the dashboard of my (replacement) rental car. I knew the LA office of my car rental firm was at LAX – “in the area” – I stopped and drove away in my third car for the weekend, a red Chevy Cobalt.
At 5pm I drove to Fairfax for dinner with Rhonda and Natalie of Origami fame. We had dinner at a nearby vegetarian restaurant where apparently they see starts occasionally. The ladies have good jobs in LA and seem to be retiring Origami in favour of a new poppier band with a different name.
On Monday I met Tom and Dmitri in Long Beach for morning coffee. Tom lives there and Dmitri isn’t too far away. I drove south down the 405, which is pretty crazy at that hour, and managed to get lost again. As the freeway turned south-west I faced into the morning sun and could no longer read signs. I accidentally got into an exit lane and before I knew it I was heading north back up the 10 toward the city. I took the next exit west from Compton, did a U-turn, found an onramp to the 405 and headed south again, this time finding Long Beach and eventually the Portfolio cafe.
We had a good discussion. All of us are studying behaviour in virtual worlds in some way or another, but Dmitri is quantitative, Tom’s an ethnographer and I’m somewhere in between. Tom has done a lot of field-work in Indonesia and worked at ANU. Dmitri has just published a major paper data-mining Everquest.
Last stop for me was a quick trip to Disneyland. I know that if Ellen comes to the US, this place will be on the agenda, and since it isn’t too far from Long Beach I took the opportunity to check out accommodation. After this I went back to LAX, returned the car, and got on the 6pm flight to Frisco, BART, Caltrain and back home. I feel like I need a holiday now.