[2019]
[2019]
OUR FAMILY HOLIDAYS
0252 Californian Holiday -- Los Angeles follow-on
Having finished the Californian tour proper, we had something like another two weeks staying in Los Angeles. The only specifically local thing that we did was to go and see Simon Rodea's Towers in Watts. This was an experience in itself. Simon Rodea built the Towers out of cement and broken ceramics. Reportedly it is the only genuine artwork in Los Angeles. Unfortunately they are in the middle of Watts, the black community which had recently been the subject of serious riots. To put it mildly, it was a deprived area and you took your life in the hands going there. Even when we got there we found that the exhibit was locked. Fortunately, being quite tall towers, we were able to see them from outside. It was an impressive series of works of art.
Apart from that, Los Angeles must be one of the worst places on earth to live. The climate, of course is superb; after all it is essentially desert country. Accordingly, it is marvellous to get up in the morning to clear blue skies almost every day of the year. But that's where it stops. Los Angeles seems to have no culture, no soul. I know, from later experience, that the community -- the film community that is -- in Beverly Hills has its own closely knit culture; especially amongst the Jewish community there. The rest of Los Angeles is, though, best described as a non event; a true cultural desert.
Indeed the rest of our time there was spent going round what substituted for culture there: the theme parks. God knows there were enough of these. Of course the prime of these was Disneyland. It has to be said that this was superbly well done and we enjoyed the couple of days we spent there. The rides really were excellent. Rides at places like Six Flags, where we also went - along with Notts Berrry Farm, were somewhat less extravagant. On the other hand the Big Dipper at Six Flags was rather more scary, since we knew that people had regularly been killed on it! The only danger at Notts Berry Farm was being spied on in the Gents toilet, where the barn doors on the stalls were remarkably brief!
We, of course, also went on to the Universal film theme park. This was great fun. It was, in essence, a series of rides with a show attached. The problem was that it showed nothing of the reality of film making. It was supposed to show ordinary mortals how films are made. It did nothing of the sort. Instead it gave a very sanitised impression of a studio, with gimmicks showing how some so-called special effects were done. But it was entertainment I suppose.
We drove around all this time in a hired estate car. It seemed to stretch the length of the block and I would swear that it was possible to look at the fuel gauge and see it going down as we drove along; so poor was the fuel usage.
We did go to some other places, like the Observatory, looking out over Los Angeles. From there it was interesting to see the separation of the various smog layers over the city. This showed very clearly the pollution problem from which the city suffers. We also went down to the beach at Santa Monica, where the beach crowd hang out, but it was actually rather boring. We also went to Redondo Beach, where - perhaps typical of the Californian lifestyle - I was nearly knocked over by a unicyclist!
We also toured the Queen Mary, another tourist attraction which was all about the shops – along with the hotel into which the cabins had been turned. But it offered little real feel of what the reality of ocean travel had been like. We got that later when we travelled on the QE2.
Eventually we flew back to England. My parents had a rather more adventurous time. Their plane was delayed, so they were sitting in the hotel waiting to be collected. Regrettably Cosmos forgot to collect them and they were left behind in Los Angeles. Fortunately, Freddie Laker's airline paid for them -- on the basis that it would collect later from Cosmos -- and even managed to get them a flight onwards to Manchester where they were supposed to finish their journey. Cosmos gave them nothing. This contrasted with our complaint were we got several hundred dollars. The amount of money received from a complaint is dependent upon how hard you push rather than the degree of the complaint!
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