Sequoias

For all the wandering in awe of human-made environments, nothing quite tops what comes naturally - as in the Giant Sequoias of California. Hats off to California State Parks for the ambience of Calaveras Big Trees State Park.  My wife and I were there over the Fourth of July weekend, when it was so hot we picked the perfect morning and evening light and temperatures in which to walk two miles of trails in the North Grove. For much of the time we had the place to ourselves. These pictures show that for all the high-rises of Hong Kong and the splendor of say, California's state Capitol building, it's hard to beat a primeval forest in the Sierra Nevada at 7:30 in the morning.

Downtown, City of Angels

A few weeks ago long-time good friends in Southern California treated us to a tour of downtown Los Angeles with the Los Angeles Conservancy. On this particular Saturday morning we did the Broadway Theater and Commercial District walk. If you like downtowns I can't recommend this highly enough. We had a really knowledgeable guide who took us back to the pre-Depression days of the 1920s when this small, young Pacific city added a score of elegant theaters to its downtown core. We walked for two hours or more through a district that's since become a Latino shopping zone. As always, I like to look up to these great geometric squares and designs when architects and builders believed in beauty and embellishment, a time before it became apparently impossible to afford such displays of good taste.  

Yes, we did visit one theater, the interior of the Tower. It's used occasionally for rock shows and small presentations. As our guide said, these old movie palaces have been saved and preserved, but not yet found a new purpose. Sitting inside the Tower, I could only think it may take 50 more years for that purpose to materialize. In the meantime, cheers to those who saved these grand places!

Our walking companions pointed out this below as the work of a famed UK artist named Banksy.

Again, where do you see such attention to detail (below) in 2014?

We had the good fortune to be with a Los Angeles Times reporter who lives downtown and took us to the roof of a building now filled with garment manufacturing, but apparently being repackaged for a tech firm. Nice view from the roof...

Returning to Pershing Square via a wonderful fast tour of the Last Bookstore we arrived at the historic Biltmore Hotel  for a romp through the halls. This wall-size picture below is from a banquet at the hotel's opening almost a century ago.

And such great hallways!

It's so easy in California to think of Los Angeles in terms of sprawl and endless suburbia, and never to had much of any experience in downtown. Downtown in the City of Angels was real, with a huge farmers market and thousands of new residential units in the works. It has a long way to go and I'd advise about a million new trees if I was on the mayor's staff. But a wonderful way to spend a few hours before heading to Malibu, then to a great place for wine tasting near Thousand Oaks and home to our friends' house in Simi Valley. Oh, and of course, the weather was perfect.