Oh, you’ve made a big mistake bucko, no no, sit down, you’re not going anywhere now, you’re looking at our holiday photos.
I am a product of the land of the 4th of July, I grew up on American internet culture, Saturday morning cartoons, and big movies, and yet I had never actually, in my 27 years of being on this planet, visited the US of A. So, I added it to ✓ Project Bucket List, and made the decision that I’d head across the pond and see me some of the west.
My dear partner, Kymberley, booked some work over there in October 2024, right around Halloween, so as she was already going to be over there, I tagged along as her assistant (this made it a business trip, so everything became expenses, you see?), and so, I got to spend a week in sunny Los Angeles, California.
Look, I’ll try and keep this brief, I know this is the equivalent of me grabbing you by the neck and forcing you to look at holiday photos, but you’ve already read 4 paragraphs, so you’re already committed. Strap in.
The trick with an 11 and a half hour flight going west is that you try your darn tootine’st to not sleep, you do that, so that when you get to where your going, it means you just had a crazy late night, not an inverted sleep pattern. First thing we do is land and go directly to the car rental place, where I pick up this beautiful Ford Mustang, a car that I’ve wanted to drive since I realised how cool they are. We drive back to this cute AirBnb in Glendale, our base for the week, and all throughout the drive from LAX I am terrified of both this car, other drivers, and Google Maps.
We rise and shine early in the morning at around midday, and decide to head to Hollywood, to tick off one of Kymberley’s Bucket List items – see the Hollywood Sign. We head to Ovation Hollywood, where we’ve been told to park, and immediately step outside to see, just there, a spec in the distance between the arching buildings, the sign!
Hollywood Boulevard is the most touristy part of LA, tour guides shout up and down the street, and all around you you’re constantly reminded “this is the town where the movies are made“. Outside the historic Chinese Theatre, there’s hundreds of hand prints of some of the biggest names in western cinema (pretty ironic, considering the name of the theatre, huh?). We walk around, grab the sights, the snaps, and a few fridge magnets, then after lunch at iHOP (the pictures on the menu are better than they actually taste), we head back to the car, but not before realising that we’ve stopped off where the actual fucking Oscars are held. Lovely little surprise.
Then, we headed over to the Paramount Studios to have a tour. I’ll stick some nice pictures below. Having grown up near Benidorm of all places, I have a this odd taste in my mouth about tourism. I don’t look down on it, but I have this awkward air of superiority about it, where I feel like I won’t enjoy touristy things because they’re, well, touristy. This is an absolutely silly thing to think, and having gone through the Paramount tour, I’ve got to say it’s amazing. The gent who showed us around was outstanding, really friendly and open to chat, and the actual tour itself was really interesting. Oh, and look, here we are holding an Oscar. How cool is that?
NB: We also got a cookie.
We wrap up the tour, and at this point we’re exhausted, so we decide to head back and conk out on this triple quadruple king sized mega bed. I adored this bed, and I have never said that about an Airbnb bed. We sleep like triple quadruple kings, and wake up bright and early the next morning to hike up to Griffith Observatory. Now, going to a star observatory is on the list, and I guess this technically counts, but it also absolutely doesn’t count, but I’m an SEO whizz and I want the backlink anyway so suck it.
I didn’t play much GTA 5, but the bit I did was spent hanging out around the observatory crashing vehicles off the mountain. It was bizarre to go to a place and know the architecture well enough to walk around it and know what was around each corner having never been there. Photos could not replicate this experience, so I am now growing interested in the application of videogame spaces as a method of replicating real world spaces for learning. I haven’t done anything with these thoughts yet, but I think it’s pretty neat.
We spent the rest of the day Good Will Hunting – and I don’t mean smacking windows and talking about apples. Los Angeles has a colossal spread of charity shops, all under the Good Will brand. We must’ve gone to, I don’t know, 7 or 8 of these stores? I got a cool shirt and Kymberley got the absolutely most gorgeous dress and boots that I’ve ever seen in my life. Good Will stores have this bizarre thing where a live speaker will randomly announce that The Bin will be coming out soon, and to please not crowd The Bin until The Bin stops moving.
I didn’t understand what this was until a few hours into our second hand journey, where a nice host explained that The Bin was a random pile of all the old crap they couldn’t sell, discounted, and wheeled out onto the floor in a trolley. I’m not sure if they expected people to jump onto this trolley full of random crap like rabid animals, but people didn’t seem to give a single shit about it, every time.
Next up, we go to an Ice Hockey game, a unique experience in that it was mostly about baseball. For context, we got VIP tickets to watch the LA Kings play the Vegas Knights. I don’t know much about ice hockey, but 10 minutes into the game one player punched another person so hard his helmet flew across the ice, and the crowd went ballistic. Every time somebody scored a goal, they played a train horn sound over the speakers and a coked up announcer screamed and hollered through the mic. It was wonderful.
On and off throughout this game, they keep replacing the stream on the massive screens with footage of a baseball game, and everybody was transfixed. Then, they cut back to the dancecam, where you can win the prize of being the centre of attention. We get to the third round, and Kymberley and I are starting to feel really really tired, and a little ill. We decide that we’ll head off, and as we leave, the screens cut back to the baseball, and something special happens.
The Los Angeles Dodgers win The World Series (A competition that only North American teams play in).
The crowd flips. Staff are jumping over their stands running with their phones into the crowd. The place is in utter shambles, everybody’s favourite team has won the most important thing in the world, there’s singing, there’s dancing, there’s grown ass adults running through the hallway screaming things like “better put yo kids to bed because nobody ain’t sleeping tonight”.
We step outside the arena, deciding that now would be a good time to leave, and enter a silent road with nothing but a mounted police force, heading in the direction we’d parked the car. There’s a weird air in the air as we leave, something big is about to go down, police are everywhere, and they’re blocking roads off. I can see guns and megaphones and flashing blue lights everywhere. As we leave, all the nice cars are exiting at the same time. It reinforces the idea that people want to get out of here stat – or they want to be a part of it.
The next morning, we wake up to hear that a bus was set on fire. And yet. Weirdly enough, despite the whole apocalypse feel, I felt more comfortable around the American sport fans than I’ve ever felt around English sport fans. There was a nice vibe, everybody was happy and excited, and I’m not saying that there’s not the same thing in the UK, but there’s this undertone of hooliganism and a threatening aura. I didn’t feel that in the states, despite all the guns. To quote Kymberley “It was more like they’d attack a bus, but not a human“. I guess that’s LA for you.
The next day, we meet up with a colleague of Kymberley’s, Roy Forbes, CEO of Bee Audio, who gives us the entirety of all the hot gossip on LA. He’s a lovely guy, very passionate about where he lives, and he gave us this excellent recommendation of a beach bar for lunch, which we beelined to immediately. This beach bar is a short bike ride away from Santa Monica pier, which we rode to after lunch. If you haven’t been to Santa Monica Pier before, just go visit Brighton, and imagine that there’s Americans instead of seagulls. It’s a lovely spot with even more fridge magnets up for grabs.
At this point in our US Adventure, we’re both starting to feel weak and sick. Flash back to Heathrow airport, and we stood next to an elderly man who started coughing, leaned across and spluttered all across me. I’ll give you the spoiler warning now – we both got covid, and we got it bad, something we found out when we came back to the UK and did the little test. At this point we were cycling back to the car and finding it very difficult to stay upright. We get back to the car and get dolled up – did I forget to mention? It’s Halloween, and we’ve been told the best neighbourhood to have an authentic US Halloween experience.
We get dolled up in our outfits, and head out to find that, the way they show it in the movies – you know where all the kids are walking around in costume and the streets are full? Well that pales in comparison to how it was in the area we hung out in. It felt like being at a festival, every point of the sidewalk was crowded full of costumes, ranging from store-bought costumes of nondescript IPs, to homemade monstrosities made by families of special effects artists (remember, we’re right near Hollywood).
The atmosphere was incredible, light-hearted and happy. We picked up candy a from a few of the busier places, and despite the fact that I clearly looked like Jesus if he was in a moon cult, we caught oohs and aahs as we explained that it was a couple’s costume titled “a match made in heaven“. Now if you’ve got a sickly sweet taste in your mouth after reading that – good, enjoy the diabetes, and try be happier for me you goose.
We went home feeling sick and delusional, collapsed into bed, and then Kymberley woke up bright and early to go to her first work thing. I can’t go into detail on what it was, because of NDA things, and also because it makes me feel important for using the word “NDA”. While she’s busy, I swing by and go to the The Autry Museum of the American West.
Those that know me know that I dig cowboys, and those that I’ve spoken to since going on this trip know how haunted I was by the experience. The first section of the museum asks the questions “what do we mean by the west?” and starts to explore these nebulous splodge of ideas on what the west means.
Occasionally it introduces something that challenges the idea of the west, such as a large scale diorama of Monument Valley, complete with movie props stilts and a little card about the abuse of the land and it’s people. The second section of the museum that I visited explores the history of the west, and goes into more depth about the use of violence to take Northern America during the early years of it’s conquest, and the final section…
The final section presents history from the perspective of the indigenous peoples. It looks at the history of their treatment, what the colonisers did to them, how they twisted history, what they did to the women, their land, everything.
I entered the museum thinking that the indigenous people’s of America were probably mistreated during the last 500 years of the country, but I left understanding what that meant. There’s a section when you exit that exhibit that prompts you take a moment to sit down and reflect, and to take all the time you need having experienced some genuinely heavy pieces of history.
I sat there overlooking this garden for 5 minutes, before turning around and seeing a wall full of post-it notes from visitors to the museum, claiming sorrow and confusion at why all of this hadn’t been taught to them at schools, and why it was never discussed.
It’s an incredibly moving experience, and one that has changed my attitude towards how serious the conquest of America was. Despite how lovely the fridge magnets are, this is a country built on blood.
After work, we go back to the AirBnb, and the worst of the covid hits. We both sleep for 18 hours.
The next day, Kymberley heads to the studios, while I go to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, or LACMA. I’m here to tick another item off my bucket list, I’ve come for one painting in specific, White Centre by Mark Rothko. Rothko is a divisive painter, many love him, many hate him. I’ve subscribed to the whole history of his paintings, and the mythos surrounding the emotional outpouring of viewers when seated in front of his dominating art.
I cover this more in the article about the Rothko itself. I do have an emotional reaction, but I wager it’s more down to the emotional build up of having looked for one of his pieces for so long. LACMA is a brilliant place, it’s full of impressive work by Picasso and personal favourites such as The Treachery of Images – well worth a visit if you’re an art buff.
The rest of the afternoon is spent engaging in retail therapy, before I stumble back over to the studio to collect Kymberley. As a treat because we’ve both been really well behaved and not eaten anything off the ground, we go to this massive antique bookshop, and Kymberley fulfils a lifelong dream of standing on a ladder in a bookshop.
We decide to have an easy night in, before I come across something interesting on Facebook. There’s been sightings at Santa Monica Pier and all up Malibu of Bioluminescent Algae, another thing off the bucket list! We hop in the car, sit in an hour and 20 minute of traffic, and before long we’re at the beach again, and watching a tow truck take away the one car parked where we planned to stop.
We’re barely lucid at this point, with the sickness making us both chill and sweat, so we park in a multistorey, and head for the beach, where we witness one of nature’s wonders. Brilliant flashes of blue as the waves break lighting up the sea in front of us. What an outstanding thing to experience. We didn’t stay at the beach long, covid was in full force by now. Full disclosure, I have no memory of returning back to the Airbnb – I shouldn’t have been driving, but it makes for a great story.
The last full day, and Kymberley is back at the studio, so I head to a few more museums, ticking one more thing off of ✓ Project Bucket List, seeing a Blackbird Plane in a museum. They’re amazing pieces of engineering, and I think they’re neat, so I head over to The California Science Center, who have a fully grown, organic, fed-on-grass Blackbird A-12 in their car park. The museum in itself is stupendous, read more about the experience at that link just up a few lines. Then, I head over to the natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, where I am so sure that this where they filmed the Night at the Museum movies, despite google telling me otherwise.
We get to the end of the day, I collect Kymberley and then we go for tacos, before going to sleep one last time and setting off the next morning for the airport.
Visiting LA was not a trip I expected to take, but I’m thrilled that I did. Kicking back and experiencing a new place, properly trying to enjoy somewhere and taking advantage of what it had to offer, is something I’ve not had a chance to do as an real adult. I’ve prioritised work and limited the amount of fun I can have. Even holidays held the subtext of being work trips, trying to book meetings to make deals happen overseas. For me, this felt like my first time actually treating a big holiday as a big holiday.
If you’ve got somewhere you’ve always wanted to go – it doesn’t matter where – I want you to go online tonight and just have a quick look at how much flights cost. If they’re expensive, look far ahead in the future for cheaper ones, it’ll be nice to have something to look forward to. Life is too short to wait, and it’s entirely down to you to book these trips, nobody else will. Oh, and make sure to drink some water, you need to keep hydrated, it’s good for your skin.
