June 16th, 2001

From the City of Angels...

Okay.. since I neglected the journal yesterday I'm going to make up for it today...

First of all...

More on this later.

Like I said in my previous entry, I like Fresno, I like Fresno a lot. I don't much like Los Angeles though.

Started out the day yesterday doing what last minute errands I needed to get done. Around noon I went out to Sandy and Ed's shop to visit before I left for LA. Ed takes me out to a restaraunt for lunch, and we idly chit chat about different things during the meal. Afterwards we head back to the shop and he goes over the directions for getting down to Los Angeles International. The hotel I've booked isn't even a mile from the airport, and getting to it looks pretty easy as I'm able to stick to highway and Interstate the entire way.

The trip down to LA from Fresno isn't all that long. I took Highway 41 south until I hit 99, and I end up taking that a majority of the trip south. What I find extremely amusing is that people consider Fresno and Bakersfield to be in the rural parts of the state, but, especially Fresno, the cities are large and developed as is most of the land on the outskirts of the towns... lots of freeway and clover-clover leafs and the the like. It's when you get a ways out of town and are between Fresno and Bakersfield that the landscape looks like a more arid version of Iowa. Lots of grass and farmland, silos, fields and the like.

The area between Bakersfield and Los Angeles looks to be more of the same, up until you get around the area that 99 runs smack into I-5. Mountains, once again, loom up in the distance and traffic begins to increase. You can also tell that the Interstate will be winding it's way into the mountains. This stretch of the road is called "The GrapeVine". It's really quite cool... the interstate inclines gradually and you find yourself slowly winding through the mountains. There are several lakes scattered along I-5 in this area, but they are barely visible from the road. The hills are mostly empty, but there are areas of a lot of developement. Scores of houses speckle the mountain sides, and there are entire rest stop areas with places to eat and refuel.

Traffic is also getting a lot heavier at this point. There's a reason I don't have a lot of pictures of things once I start getting into the city areas down here... staying alive in traffic became more important than photographing stuff. It's particularly insane once you get into Los Angeles City proper. You sort of drop out of the mountains and into the San Fernando valley. Traffic moves along briskly... and there are an enormous number of cars all hauling ass around you. And here I am, sorta poking along looking for Interstate 405, people passing every which way around me.. and I'm going 80 mph.

Then suddenly all traffic comes to a complete halt. It's like 7:30pm, and traffic has jammed to a standstill. And it's like that both ways... actually worse coming out of LA than going in. A good 10+ lanes of traffic barely moving.

It took me 2 hours to get through the traffic. Alie owes me. Big time.

Oh... once again, let me re-iterate. Holy shit, is this city huge. And congested. No wonder this place chokes on smog all the time... I can feel my sinuses getting cranky from all the garbage in the air.

I didn't take any pictures while stuck in traffic either... I figured if I started taking snap shots of things while gridlocked I would be putting on the great big neon I'm a tourist! Carjack Me! sign on my head. Plus I was just in some sort of awe or something of the sprawling bigness of this city.

I didn't take many pictures of LAX either. By the time I got to the hotel I couldn't care less about taking pictures, I just wanted to eat and get some work done. You're not missing a whole lot there.

All you Iowans, want to know what just blew my mind? LAX looks like it's about the size of Cedar Falls. It's a city... an entire frigging city. It has 5(I think) interstate exits to get to the different areas of it. They have their own phone book, for the airport and the outlying businesses that service it. It's insane. The airport has something like 10 terminals that service about 3 dozen different airlines. Remember this...

I went to a fast food place called Jack in the Box for dinner. Not too bad either. I'd never seen one of these before... they might be a west coast sort of thing or something.

So... it's about 10 pm now... and I'm digging out all the information for picking Alie up at 5am tommorrow morning. Now... about that note from earlier... well, this wasn't totally Alie's fault, I didn't even think to ask her this once she sent me her flight information. I had flight time, date, flight number, and where it was flying in from. I didn't, however, know what airline she was coming in on.

This was bad, very bad.

I go down to the front desk and ask the manager guy if he has any suggestions about how I could figure out what airline she's flying in on. You know Habib, from The Simpsons? The owner of the Kwik-E-Mart? Well, that's this desk manager. When I tell him the entire situation, he gives me the "Um... you're screwed." look and suggests I call 411 from one of the pay phones in the lobby and get the Airport's main telephone number. He also says it should be a free call. Okay, fine, so I go to do that. "Please deposit $0.35 to continue this call."
Grrrr..

I ponder going back up front and powerbombing Habib through the manager's desk when I discover the Airport Phone Book(the one I was talking about earlier). I steal it and take it back up to my room. In it is a list of all the airlines that service LAX with contact numbers and their locations in the airport.

Before I go and start dialing down the list I call Alie's parents in Florida to see if they know anything at all about her flight. It is, by this time, 2am in the morning there. They don't pick up the phone.

So... I spend the next hour and a half dialing all the airlines in sequence. Finally, I get this guy from Continental, and yes, they have a flight coming into LAX from Honolulu at the time I'm looking for. Yes, it's the same flight number. And yes, there's a passenger named Alison on the flight.

So... I spend the entire night awake, since by the time I got everything figured out it was a little after 1am and I had to be up at 4 to be ready to pick her up.

Ugh...

Navigating LAX wasn't all that terrible, really. I got turned around a few times trying to get where I was going, but I think that's mainly because I was a zombie at this point and it was still dark.

Found the right terminal, found the right gate and was waiting there with sign in hand. Her flight gets in, and she was like one of the last people to get off the flight. Apparently her trip over hadn't gone all that well... she almost got bumped coming over. Oh... and her friends had gotten her drunk the night before she left and the flight hadn't agreed with her stomach. At all.

The rest of the stay in LA and the trip back out wasn't all that exciting. We were both basically walking dead and we passed out when we got back to the hotel. The drive out of the city was pretty much the same as the drive in, highway, traffic, gridlock. Alie ogling at stop lights and fast moving traffic since she's been on an island out in the middle of the pacific ocean for the past year. One notable thing... I had been impressed with the fact that I hadn't seen a single accident anywhere as I'd been on the trip down to and now out of LA. I'm thinking this just as I hear a squealing noise behind me and look back just in time to see what looked to be a red Dodge Durango SUV go, literally, airborne several cars back and land on it's roof. Traffic had suddenly stopped and the only thing I can think of was that he was hauling ass and didn't notice the sea of red taillights. I debated stopping to see if the passengers were all right, but about a dozen people in other cars around me jumped out and ran to the scene... so I figured I'd just be getting in the way if I went.

On the way back up, we stop in Bakersfield and find the cemetary Grandpa is buried in. It took a little while to do... it's located out on the outskirts of town, the mountains looming not far off in the distance.

Afterwards, we drive back up to Fresno and eat dinner with Sandy, Ed, Gen and a friend of hers named Vivia. After dinner I go for a swim in the pool, then retire for the night... it's been a long 48 hours.