Earthshake!

We ended July as we had begun it, with a trip to Los Angeles. After Maya gets off work at about 7:00 in the evening we pile our stuff in the car and then head on to L.A. right then. It’s about 3 hours away so it is a reasonable trip to make, even starting at 8:00 at night. Plus there is always a lot less traffic! Most of the way between here and there is a two-lane (each way) highway but people here don’t seem to know how to use it! Right lane for slower traffic and left lane for faster traffic doesn’t seem to be part of how people on the Central Coast drive. Invariably when we travel U.S. 101 we get caught behind someone in the fast lane going the same speed or only marginally faster than traffic in the slow lane. We’ve even seen people going slower in the fast lane. The thing that amazes us over and over again about this is that these jack-ups appear to be totally unaware that they are jacking things up! Even when there are 10-15 cars behind them as they creep past a semi or when several people pass them on the right they just continue to drift along in their own little alternate reality where road rules don’t apply to them! So, at night we meet far fewer of these slow-downs.

Also at night we get to see the scary off-shore oil derricks that work in the Santa Barbara Channel. You can’t really see them in the daytime, but at night they are lit up bright and they shine across the water like monstrous robots fighting machines waiting for the signal to invade or maybe carnival islands where shady characters turn kids into donkeys. Except “shine” isn’t really the right word. They kind of glow with eerie light. We always think Matt’s sister, Sarah, and how much she wouldn’t like them. Seeing those oil drilling platforms means two things. That you get a little bit of a shiver and that you are getting close to L.A.

In L.A. we always like to do a little shopping. Not like high-fashion shopping at the stores that only a metropolis like L.A. has. More like the regular stores that L.A. has because it’s so large that are far and few between on the Central Coast. Like Target, for instance. The Target happens to be next to a California Pizza Kitchen so we all (us and Maya’s grandparents) went there for lunch. They got some kind a pizza with steak. It’s a favorite of theirs. We got a Vegetarian with Japanese Eggplant pizza. It had red pepper, red onions, broccoli and, of course, Japanese eggplants. It was the second best CPK pizza we’ve ever had! Across the street from those stores was a World Market and even though we do have one of those near us we wanted to look at this one too. We can hardly ever resist a World Market…

The Big Fun of this trip was our visit to the Santa Anna Zoo. We were on our way when an earthquake struck. Really! We were just leaving and had only gotten about two blocks from the house (the renovations are almost done) when it struck. Matt thought there was something in the road and Maya thought there was something wrong with the car, but then we came to the stop at the end of the street and saw that the poles for the street lights were shaking. There was no wind so then we knew we’d felt an earthquake. The shaking didn’t feel long. Maybe as much as ten seconds. Maybe. We don’t know if there’s any kind of protocol for just after a quake, but we looked up and down the street and no one else had stopped driving. Nothing looked to be damaged so we just turned onto the main street and went on. It was only later when family called to check on us that we even thought it might have been a big deal. It was a magnitude 5.4 which is considered strong, but there was no major damage. Some brick façades fell down right at the center of it and a few buildings had to be closed for repairs. Nothing major.

So the zoo… Maya knew it was small. Grandpa told us it was small but when we got there we found that it was… small. And part of it was closed! It may be bigger than the Charles Paddock Zoo, but it somehow didn’t feel as big or as open. The habitats were also not that impressive. But animals are almost always enjoyable to see. The zoo seems to specialize in primates. They have a whole Primate Row with 15 or more different types of monkeys and small apes. The gibbon was lounging but consented to have his picture taken. We looked at the Bolivian squirrel monkeys for quite a while. They are small and cute, but their expressions and movements are strangely familiar. We also liked the acouchi very much. We didn’t get a great picture and the ones available on-line are not as cute as the one we saw. He was sitting in a planter to the side of the cage. Just sitting there in the pot and watching everything. He looked like a lucky captain acouchi king.
In the South America yard we met a very pretty guanaco and across the path in the Australia yard was a very sad looking creature called a swamp wallaby. It had a look about like it had been a-moldering in the swamp until very recently. It looked sad and sort of lost like it had been pulled out of its happy moldering swamp and left to dry out in a strange, sunny world. Maybe that goes a bit too far. Maybe. We also found another bird for our theoretical future aviary. The scarlet ibis looks just fantastic. We sat down in the Colors of the Amazon aviary and talked about our green house slash solarium and how well grow orange trees even back in Kentucky and have birds and stream running through the place where we can relax and enjoy our exotic birds and our eccentric plants.

The last section of the zoo we visited had farm-type animals. We saw pigs and goats and geese and a donkey: farm-type animals. There was also a large, sad rabbit who just wouldn’t come out to talk to us. There used to be two rabbits in the enclosure but one of the names was scratched off. We think the remaining rabbit is just sad and lonely to have no other rabbit to talk to anymore. And we saw a totally crazy chicken covered in very hair-like feathers. Totally crazy.

Fly a Kite! ...or Not

We have been getting interesting in kites. We had a cheap-cheap kite years ago in Louisville but it broke the first time we used it. We got another cheap-cheap kite in Tallahassee but it’s still holding up. It works great. We also have another kite. It’s called a flying star. The package says, “Flies like a pro!” But it doesn’t. We have yet to get it to fly at all. It’s small so it shouldn’t take much wind but it doesn’t seem to have any lift. Even “wind tunnel” tests with our fan produced no kite-like action. In late July we went to a near-by park to give the kite another go. There just wasn’t any wind at all.

Not to be foiled, we took our kites to Pismo Beach. The beach part of Pismo Beach. We had some wind there and got our cheap kite up in the air. The wind was very gusty though so just when you thought the kite was up and going well, the wind would give out and the kite would come down. Alas for these temperamental coastal breezes!

We gave up on kites and went home to get Asher. After all, even if your can’t fly a kite, you can always walk a rabbit. We thought he would like a bit of time in the park. There are several parks in our area of Pismo Beach. The largest is Dinosaur Caves Park. Matt was thinking of it as on the site of some fossil beds or maybe the coastal cliffs were reminiscent of sculpted dinosaurs or something. No. It turns out that in the ‘50s there was a guy who promoted his lapidary with a large concrete sauropod and tours of a sea cave. Both are now gone, but the memory of them gave the park its name. The sign at the park (picture above) is all the information we know about the place.

So, we went back to Dinosaur Caves Park with our rabbit in tow. He ran around a little bit. The park had bands of irrigated grass as well as bands of dry scrub. We though Asher might like digging in the dry dirt. He didn’t show much interest and headed back to the grassy area. He spends a lot of his time outside just grooming. He doesn’t seem to be that interested in looking good when he’s inside. We like to joke that he’s trying to get his fur all straight and clean in case he meets a doe-rabbit. You never know when a pretty girl will show up! When he wasn’t licking his back and feet he mostly sat in one of our shadows. “Walking” a rabbit is actually mostly standing around while the rabbit does its own thing.

The night before we had tried a wine called cabernet blanc. We have been trying a lot more white wines of late. The brand was Rock Rabbit. Inspired by this, Matt put Asher up on one of the rocks that line the edge of the park. He sat still long enough to get the picture but that face… that’s a rabbit scowl.

There are a lot of pelicans in the area. They drift along the coast hardly ever moving their wings. We have seen then passing over head in big V-shapes of at least 30 birds. Sometimes several of these huge formations pass by in rapid succession. Most often there are just one or two drifting through the sky. Maya says they look like pterodactyls. It’s an apt comparison. They do look like some nearly mythic thing as they slide through the æther seemingly impassive to the world. We’ll miss them when we move away. We’ll miss a lot about California when we move away.

And a Lompoc is What, Exactly?

As we mentioned before, we had planned to go to la Purísima near Lompoc and then go on to Santa Barbara and see the zoo there. We failed to check the weather assuming it would be clear and wonderfully warm (that’s how California is supposed to be, after all). As it turned out it was overcast, downright foggy, a little rainy and cold! After we finished at the mission we called the Santa Barbara visitor center and since their weather was more of the same we decided not to go. Yet we didn’t feel like going home either. So we drove into Lompoc and had a look around. Turns out it’s a nice little town.

Matt had read something about a museum in the town so we went there first. It was really small. It looks like it might have been a bank at some point in the past. It hasn’t been, it’s just got that Greek temple look. The building was originally a Carnegie Library. The ground floor was all native artifacts from the area and from all over, really – it’s a collection assembled by one particular guy and then donated to the museum. Most of the artifacts are from the Chumash culture. They made all kinds of mortars for grinding acorns and the like. They also made impractically gigantic ones, for ceremonial purposes apparently. They used tar seeping to the surface to repair broken pots and to assemble composite shell jewelry. Don’t let anyone tell you Indians weren’t smart because they didn’t developed steel or domesticate horses. They were masters of their environment.

In the basement of the museum were displays of local town history. There were some stuffed examples of local fauna, artifacts from some of the earliest shops in the town and a kind of whole-town family album. It was made from one of those things one typically sees at the store with various posters on display. This one was full of old family pictures. You can turn through the big, rigid pages and see all the generations of the prominent families as they looked when they first moved to the area, then their children and their children… It’s most likely even more interesting when it’s one’s own family. There was also a small display about the mission.

There was a large display about the Point Honda Navel Disaster. It seems that in the years between the world wars there was a group of US Navy ships that were making a training run at high speed and under radio silence from San Francisco to San Diego. There’s a point on the California coast where headed south on such a run you must turn sharply to starboard to enter the channel between the mainland and the Channel Islands. The first ship in the line had miss-judged or misread something and made that sharp turn too far north and rammed herself into the rocks near Lompoc. Since they were under radio silence no one else in the line realized they were on the wrong course or what was happening, at least not at first. Several other ships ran full aground or split themselves open on the rocks before those even further back in line figured out they were all headed for land. They tried to back-pedal but they had a lot of forward momentum to go against. In total, seven ships were lost. The museum has some salvaged equipment from the ships, information about what happened, photos from the days after and a large (about 7 x 5 feet) painting of some of the wrecked ships.

In the center of the basement was a case with a huge piece of diatomite inside. The Celite mine for diatomite and diatomaceous earth is near Lompoc. Along with the diatomite, which has a tonne of industrial uses, they haul out fossils as well. The big block in the case was a fossilized dolphin!
At the museum we learned that the original site of la Purísima mission was only a couple of blocks away. How could we not go check it out? A lot of the missions have a corresponding mission vieja, the old mission, but this is the first we have been to. There is not a lot left. The heart of the site is under a cul-de-sac in an otherwise ordinary neighborhood. If you weren’t there because a brochure told you to go there, you likely would miss the ruins altogether. A hodge-podge of city, state and community organizations have worked together to buy up corners and little strips of yards and alley ways so that the remaining ruins are all freely accessible. There are really informative signs placed around to tell you what you are looking at. There just isn’t much to see. The front and back wall of the church still remain (at least in part). The remains of a water trough are also still around. Part of the old aqueduct can be seen sticking out of the embankment where a rail road passed by. The really amazing thing about the site is that in the distance you can see the split in the hills where the land ripped itself apart. Almost 200 years later that hill looks like it was cut with a knife. Awesome! Awesome in the it-fills-one-with-wonder kind of way.

And the wonders of Lompoc continue! There are a lot of murals painted all over town. It’s a big tourist draw. Or it’s trying to be. There are a lot of flowers grown in the Santa Ynez valley. A “significant percent” of America’s cut flowers come from the valley. To add to this tourist draw the murals started. Lompoc now bills itself as “The City of Art and Flowers.” There are supposed to be more than 60 murals. We walked a four-block circuit or so and saw quite a few. Some are very abstract, some are realistic, most are very nostalgic. They harken back to the days of the early flower boom, a brief gold rush or the founding of the town as a temperance colony.

Lompoc needs all this tourism because other industries have taken a turn for the worst in the last few decades. The biggest hit was the closure of Space Launch Complex 6. That’s right! There was a planned shuttle launch site at the Vandenberg Air Force Base just to the west of Lompoc. In the cut-backs after the Challenger was lost the launch site was closed. Lompoc had planned on reaping the benefits of people coming to watch the shuttles go up and then had to invent something else for people to come and see instead. It’s working out for them, it seems. You can even still visit the would-have-been shuttle launch site. Back at home, on this day Matt’s family was celebrating Moon Day.

Begin some über-nerdiness from Matt:
Speaking of launch sites, I have a habit of scouring Google Earth looking for strange rock formations and the remains of old castles and that sort of thing. Well, some ago I noticed some weird structures out in China’s Taklamakan Desert. They look something like oil wells, but only something like it. In looking at the roads to Lompoc when planning this day of adventure I noticed similar structures at Vandenberg Air Force Base. It turns out that VAFB is one of the first missile installations on the west coast. I don’t have details as of now, but there’s a good chance that what I’m looking at in the California hills are those silos. If that’s that case, then there is a possibility that what I’m looking at in the Taklamakan are also missile silos. I guess China’s gotta have its launch sites too. In any case, here’s some pictures for all of you (if there are any you) who are interested and the coordinates if you want to do some arm chair surveillance of your own.Vandenberg AFB: 34º 43' N, 120º 27' WSite in Taklamakan: 38º 58' N, 83º 50' E
:end some über-nerdiness from Matt. (Maya rolls her eyes)

In closing, let us say that Lompoc has taken on something of an antithesis quality in respect to Solvang. The two cities are forever related in our minds. As we travel to L.A. the exits for the two cities are in the same place. Go west for Lompoc and east for Solvang. They both have missions. They both have unusual names. Now we have been to both towns. The antithesis quality comes in because when we went to Solvang it was one of the hottest days this summer and when we went to Lompoc it was one of the coldest days we’ve had. They are like mirror images, one in fire and one in ice. So, what is a lompoc? It’s from the Chumash for “little lake.” Is there a little lake near Lompoc? Not so much. So why is it named that? No idea.

We Saw the Immaculate Conception of Saint Mary

For our anniversary this year we went out for lunch. We (at least so far) have not made a big deal of our anniversary. It goes with our generally laid-back nature. Anyway, we went to lunch in “down town” Pismo Beach to a place called Giuseppe’s. It was a nice enough restaurant. They offered brick oven pizzas and so we each got one. Matt really enjoyed his, but Maya not so much hers. Arugula on pizza turns out not to be her style. Three years! Yea!

On July 20 we headed south and east to visit a mission near the city of Lompoc. The mission La Purísima Concepcion de Maria Santisima was originally founded in what is now a residential neighborhood in Lompoc. It was founded in 1787 as the 11th Alta California mission. Since it was situated in the fertile Santa Ynez River valley it quickly become a prosperous and successful endeavor. Orchards, cropland, and a large heard of cattle all helped provide foodstuffs to the other missions. Everything changed in 1812, apparently remembered as Ano de los Temblores. In December several powerful earthquakes literally split the area in two. The mission was shaken apart. There will be more to say on this later. The effect of all this is that the mission had to be moved and in 1813 was re-established in its present location about 10 miles north of the old site.

Here the padres adopted an open plan that put all the buildings in a line along the valley floor rather than in a closed square. This was to aide evacuation in case of the more temblores. Despite the rebuilding, La Purísima never quite got back on its feet. The Indian converts drifted away (or died), there was a major rebellion of those that remained in 1824 which involved a lot of damage as the mission buildings were sieged by Spanish soldiers and in 1834 the Mexican government seized the property. The buildings fell into disarray quickly as the property changed hands over and over. Even when the land was returned to the Catholic Church after American conquest of the area they turned around and sold it yet again. Union Oil ended up with the property but they turned it over the State of California in 1934. The mission buildings were extensively restored and rebuilt in the 1930s as part of a CCC public works project. The whole endeavor was overseen by archeologists and historians so the effect is supposed to be largely authentic. The mission site is now the centerpiece of a large state historic park. In addition to the mission and the visitors center, there are 1,800 acres and miles and miles of trails intended for hiking and horseback riding.

The visitors center is really nice, but there isn’t much inside. There is a sign up about how the state funding was cut back before they could put together the exhibits. So they have a nice, big, nearly empty building. The restored mission is really neat. So many of the other missions we have seen are now surrounded by towns or city. Here is one that still appears to be in the middle of nowhere. Looking up into the hills from the park there aren’t any modern buildings to be seen, although some of that may have been the low cloud cover. The church is quite large but not particularly remarkable. The population was trailing off so much at the new location that services were more often held in the smaller padres’ chapel. The next building in line is the Shops and Quarters house. This building contains the garrison, the candle-making room, the kitchen, the storerooms, the loom room, all attached to several inter-connected courtyards where grain was ground and olives were pressed. Hardly anything is original, of course, but it really shows how the work of the mission was carried out. We have heard at all these other missions about the work that went on when they were in full production, but now we have seen a mission in its “full production” state.
The best preserved of the buildings, i.e. there is some of it that is original, is called the Residence Building. It is where the padres lived and worked. It contains the chapel, several apartments and offices with surprisingly nice furnishings. There is a very large room called la Sala where the padres would have greeted quests stopping at the mission in the days when it was the only semblance of western civilization around. The big, open rooms that connect in counter-intuitive ways are actually something of an inspiration to us. We keep thinking about the house we would like to build someday.
Outside, next to all the buildings is a garden. It contains the original wash basin the Chumash natives did their washing in and a fountain. The garden was neat because it is in the process of being converted to all authentic plants. The park staff is taking out plants that wouldn’t have been grown in mission days and planting ones that would have been. They have also set up very good signage explaining the use of the plants. Such-and-such weed was made into a mild pain reliever and the bark of so-and-so was processed into an oil. That kind of signage. Plus there were grapes, olives and citrus. All together the state park provides a lot of insight into former times.

We had planned to go on from Lompoc to Santa Barbara, but the day had turned out so cold and grey and wet (and cold!) that we decided not to. Instead we explored the city of Lompoc…

What We’ve Done in and Around Avila Beach

Up around the coast to the northwest is a tiny city called Avila Beach. We can see the city from our windows but you can’t get there from here. As the crow flies (or as the pelican flies, rather) it’s just a short jaunt across the water. For us landlubbers there is a coastal mini-mountain between Avila Beach and Pismo Beach so to drive there you have to go inland around the mountain. It’s a trip well worth it.

There is a nice street fair and farmers’ market held on Friday nights during the summer. A lot of the local restaurants have booths set up and you can find out about all kinds of local activities, buy flowers, buy organically prepared bath products, and all kinds of other stuff. There is also live music. The band the night we went was a decidedly second-rate metal wanna-be band. Not our style at all. Of course, we were there for the vegetables! Various booths had cabbages, carrots, rutabagas, swiss chard, tomatoes, collard greens, lavender, peaches and strawberries. The strawberries were the best. You could smell them from several booths away! They were an incredible red and so ripe and ready to eat that they were irresistible. Of course we got some. Just $5 for a couple pounds. Can’t beat that price anywhere!

In the area are a few wineries. We have tired out just two. The wine we liked the best at Salisbury Vineyards was called Pinot Naturale. It’s made from the pinot noir grape but is made as a white wine instead (fermented without the skins). It was super-good. It was strongly fruity and had a nice dry firmness behind the sweetness. Very drinkable. The office and tasting room is in an old 1907 school house. Half is the wine-tasting area and the other half is an art gallery. Interesting.

The other winery we have been to is Kelsey See Canyon Vineyards. This winery may have the best collection of wines we have ever tried! The tasting included something like 11 different wines. Nobody else has that kind of variety (at least, not that we’ve tried). Every singe one was wonderful. Their “Black Box” Zinfandel (a varietal becoming a Matt favorite of late) was good and their port was really good. Maya describes it as drinking chocolate-covered cherries. The wines we came to taste were their apple-infused wines. We had read about them in a handy little book on San Luis Obisbo County’s wineries that we picked up somewhere. The apple wines were great! The Estate Apple Chardonnay is made with apples grown right there on the property. Even better was the Apple Merlot. It was a rosé, instead of a red. Like the Pinot Naturale from Salisbury it seemed to combine the best of both red and white wines. When we told the lady running the tasting (Mrs. Kelsey herself) that we were reminded of the Pinot Naturale she smiled and told us that the wine-making master they hire to make all their wines is the same guy Salisbury hires to make their Pinot Naturale. So it was that at the end of the day we went home with two bottles of similar wine crafted by the same guy, one Harold Osborne, from two different wineries.

The place in Avila Beach we visit most often is the Avila Valley Barn. It’s a fairly unique combination of a Cracker Barrel, a grocery store, a farmers’ market and a petting zoo. Really! The store is surrounded by a bunch of farmland where they grow corn, broccoli, peppers and a lot of other stuff. This is all sold in the market area along with all kinds of other produce not gown by them. Fruits, potatoes, garlic, onions and squash are all on display. Then they have the section of prepared foods: loaves of bread, pies, cakes, pickles, dried fruit and soup mixes. Cookbooks, kitchen utensils and various crockery are all also for sale. All of this and goats, chickens, ponies, a cow, more goats, ducks and even more chickens too! We are more convinced than ever that we must have goats of our own someday. It’s a really fun place to go to get fresh produce. We are not the only ones who like it, either. It’s always packed! It’s so crowded we have yet to park in the actual parking lot. We always end up in the back-forty with the rest of the overflow parking.

Sometimes Everything Disappears

All the locals Maya talks to agree that this has been an unusual summer here on the Pacific coast. It’s been much more cloudy than normal. For most of the time we’ve been here cloudy/overcast/foggy days have been more common than bright/clear/sunny days. Usually there is a bit of June Gloom, as Maya’s Grandpa calls it. But it seems where we are it has turned into All Summer Long Gloom. Strangely, the clouds and fog seem to hover right here in our little neck of the woods. Even going 6 miles down the coast to Trader Joe’s or inland to San Luis Obispo we find a stereotypically beautiful day. Then as we come home, the clouds close in again. This is not to say that we get no pretty days. It’s often quite nice. Just sometimes…

Something fun: We bought a new shelf. We left Louisville traveling light. We left stacks and stacks of books in storage and only brought one small bookshelf with us. It’s a folding shelf too so it collapses flat. Well, we go to World Market a lot and they have a shelf there that we have been looking at longingly for years. It’s an unusual shape. It’s like an A with four cross bars that are the shelves. They have a dark-stained one that actually matches some of the furniture we already have and then an amazing rose-stained one that matches nothing but looks so much better. We went in that other day and the shelves were on clearance- 50% off! Well, we spent a while debating the pros and cons. It went something like this: Do we need it? No. Should we get a large piece of furniture while we are traveling? Probably not. But it does fold up like out other one! True. Do we want it? Of course. Will we regret it if we don’t get it? Yes. So that was that. The display model was the last one, so we got an additional $50 off! So now we have another shelf and we had no trouble filling it up with all our stuff.

Because of the shape of the shelves we also had to get a bookend in order to keep our books up. We chose a hefty plaster koi-fish. It looks great – sitting their on the shelf, holding the books up. Someday we’ll have to find a similarly eccentric something to sit on the other side of the shelf.

Metropolitan Idyll

In early July Maya had a few days off in row and so we headed down to L.A. to stay with Maya’s grandparents. Seeing all her family in L.A. as often as we can is half of the reason we came out here to California. They are in the midst of some renovation. So we woke up every morning to the old stucco being ripped off the side of the house. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but things were in an unavoidable state of disarray. We played cards, visited, picked oranges, and went shopping. We also did two big, fun things: We went to Universal Studios for a day and we saw the Mission San Gabriel.

Mission San Gabriel Arcángel is the most interesting mission we have seen since we’ve come out here. It is so solid. The construction is big thick walls of brick and adobe. There are even buttresses along the sides. It makes it look so strong. They have a nice self-guided tour. You get it at the start and then follow the stations around the property seeing the gardens, the church, the museum, the remains of the winery, the old orchard, the soap-cooking vats and the tanning tanks. It’s a real jumble of stuff in a small space. The missions, for the most part, are all built in a square. The church would sit on one corner and then there would be buildings – workrooms, storage rooms, living quarters all forming an enclosed square with only one or two gates and the gardens and animal pens in the central area. Of course, the lands of the mission were often much larger – 100s of acres. All of these lands were ceased by the Mexican government and auctioned off in the 1830s. Almost all of the land ended up in the lands of ranchers. In areas where a town had already grown up around the mission, the mission church often was still used as a church through the years. Sometimes, when the mission was not near any city, after the Indians dispersed, the buildings were used as grain storage, stables, or left to return to earth. In the 1850s and 1860s a lot of the missions had part of their lands returned to church control by the US government. Often, this was just the quadrangle (such as remained) with only a few token acres.

The Mission San Gabriel is one of those that remained in use. All most all the buildings that formed the quad still stand. All the wine-making and tanning stopped but the infrastructure for it all remains to this day. Part of it is set up as a museum. Their collection is very well annotated. Almost every item is described in detail on little note cards posted all over the place. One of the most interesting things in the collection is a set of paintings of the Stations of the Cross painted by a native convert to Christianity. Replicas of the paintings are hung in the sanctuary itself. Here’s a bit if fun history: the little town of Los Angeles was founded just a few miles to the west as an outreach effort by the mission.

Universal Studios was literally on fire when we first got to L. A. back in early June. There was some kind of accident involving roofing tiles being heated so get the tar tacky. The part of the back lot used as a double for New York burned down. This includes the building famously appearing as the clock tower in Back to the Future, although the “clock” itself had been removed to make the building look a little different so some other filming project. The point is that while we considered going then to look at the smoking rubble, we decided we were just too tired after our long trip. This time (in early July), we did go.

We went on the studio tour. The little tour trolley takes you past some of the actual studios Universal Pictures uses for their TV shows and films. They also rent space to other productions so there are all kinds of things going on at any one time. Since the tour is part of the amusement park there are various points along the route where special effects things are set up. Some cars “blow up” and come flying toward you. They are really just being tilted forward on mechanical arms. There is a flood that comes crashing down a gravel road and almost drenches the trolley before all the water just flows down some vents in the ground instead. The tour passes some sets used in old westerns and some used for movies set in old European cities. The set for the Bates Motel, with the house eerily above it is still there, looking a little creepy even on a bright day. Oddly enough, it’s right next to the set for Whoville from How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Part of the set from Jaws has a big shark that jumps out of the water, jaws agape. Also, the big crashed airplane set from War of the Worlds is still there and the tour takes you down the middle of the rubble. It really is fun to be that close to stuff we have seen in the movies. But it is also a little sad because to be that close you see that the famous clock from the famous clock tower is just a round piece of plywood with a clock face painted on it. The brick texture on buildings is as often just painted on as anything else. The look of things is all controlled with sightlines and how close they are to the camera. We know movies are fictional; they are created realities, but to see up close just how artificial they are is interesting.

The amusement park part of Universal Studios is a little less fun than we hoped it would be. It turns out that we just don’t like amusement parks after about one ride. The thing is, you pay so much to get in you can’t just ride one ride and go! We did a fair amount of things. We rode a ride based on the Mummy franchise. Matt thought it was okay but Maya thought it was really cheesy. For those twenty-somethings from Louisville, it was like the Star Chaser, but with neon-flashing mummies instead of pictures of comets. We also went on the Jurassic Park ride. It is in serious need of repair! It’s all out of synch so that the foam rubber dinosaurs pop out way before the boat gets there and then are sliding slowing back into the bushes by the time you do pass them. And the t-rex at the end is falling apart. It’s not even all covered in foam rubber anymore. Weak! The flume part of the ride still works. Gravity doesn’t exactly ever break. So we got wet at the end. Matt doesn’t like flume rides because he likes amusement parks even less when he has to walk around wet. There was also a trained animal show we saw. There were no rabbits in it but there was a parrot that flew in place with the help of a huge fan and a cat that didn’t hit its mark and took off up the aisle instead. We also wandered into a haunted house thinking it would be like a museum of Universal’s monster movies. A guy with a bloody axe standing in front of a meat locker was very helpful and pointed us toward the exit.

Maybe the best, certainly to most interesting, ride was the Simpsons-themed simulator. It has the most authentic movement of any simulator ride we’ve ever been on. Part of this is because you ride in a “car” with just a few other people. Even looking away from the screen, you don’t see a whole room of other people in shifting seats. The visual part of the ride is typical Simpsons. It’s all CGI so it doesn’t feel quite like the Simpsons’ world but the spirit is right. Totally crazy stuff happens that seems to knock and fling you all over Springfield and most of the memorable secondary characters make appearances. It’s Simpsons: The Ride, just as advertised.

One last note: at Universal Studios we saw Proof #10 of California’s Progressive Stance on Conservation and Climate Change. The trash cans in the park were all labeled: Contents sorted for Recycling. Wow!