L. A.'s Top Two

Tuesday, October 18

The choices for tourist activities in L.A. are even more overwhelming than in S.F. Our top 5 included the La Brea Tar Pits and the Page Museum both, surprisingly, set in a lush green park framed with the ubiquitous palm trees. In spite of the challenging odds against creating a Pleistocene era feeling, the eloquent docent in the current excavation and the historic recreations of the museum do quite well. Oily patches in the lawn helped to add a slightly ominous note to the bucolic manscaped veneer.

That afternoon we set off in a rented car for the wilds of Universal Studios. Expecting a total, overpriced tourist trap, we weren’t disappointed. However we had no sense of the scale of the place. First you park, then wander through a giant 2-storey mall called City Walk with every franchised label in America, until you finally run into the entry gates for the “Studios.” Ha! It’s actually an amusement park. We should have googled ahead, but that would have reduced the shock and awe.

To get in you need as much ID as for travel to a foreign land. They pressure you to get a VIP pass to go to the head of all the lines. True to Stillman form, we stuck with the bare bones pass even though we only had 3 hours til closing. As soon as we were inside we ran for the Jurassic Park river ride. It was at the far end of everything, including a series of three towering escalators that moved as if lubricated with library paste. We rushed into the very short line and boarded the boat, by chance in the front row seats.

I got out my camera and, heeding the sign “Hats will Fly Off” took off my hat. In the early stages of the ride I got unblocked pix of dinos, though a couple spat streams of water at us. Then came the dire and funny T-Rex lunges and signs saying Danger Water Treatment Facility Do Not Enter. We climbed high in the darkness and I hid my camera under my sweatshirt on my lap. At the top we saw that we were going to fall the same distance as all three escalators stacked on top of each other. Don’t you love to scream! The splash at the bottom was all real.

I spent the rest of the time at U. S. drying out and getting stared at.