Prior to this trip, I would have said there’s a zero percent chance I’ll ever move to southern California. It’s hot, crowded, noisy, expensive, the air quality is terrible (upon arrival, I invented a game; it’s called ‘Fog or Smog?’ and, as it turns out, it’s often difficult to determine the answer), and traffic is a nightmare. I don’t know how people do it. Very few things frustrate me more than sitting in traffic.
There’s still only about a five percent chance that I’ll ever move there but, after visiting, I do get it. I understand why people live there. It’s a pretty location, with access to the mountains and the ocean, the weather is pretty good for much of the year, and it has anything you could ever want and then some in terms of places to go and things to do.
But also, traffic.
The good thing is, since my sister lives there, I’ll always have a good reason to visit. And I don’t have to be the one doing the driving.
This past March was actually my first ever trip to SoCal. I spent 5 days visiting my sister and celebrating her birthday. The main part of the celebration was wine tasting in Santa Barbara, which I’ve written about over the last couple weeks. We spent the rest of the trip touring some of the famous – and some lesser known – LA attractions.
I’ve never had much desire to visit many of the common tourist sites like the Hollywood sign or the Walk of Fame or Santa Monica Pier. I’d much rather be outside in nature or learning cool things at a museum than navigating hordes of tourists just to see something that’s probably at least a little overrated. Fortunately, this is something my sister and I have in common, so she was more than happy to take me to museums and the mountains and the beach instead.
I arrived in fairly early in the morning and we headed to Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in Pasadena. If you’re reading this and thinking library + art museum + botanical gardens is a strange combination, I’m inclined to agree.
The Huntington was established in 1919 by the wealthy Henry E. and Arabella Huntington. Henry made his fortune from the railroad while Arabella inherited much of her fortune from her first husband and was, at one point, the richest woman in the world. Her love of art is what inspired much of Henry’s art collection and she was instrumental in the founding of The Huntington. The library is one of the largest in the world and is home to a handful of very rare books and manuscripts.
We didn’t actually visit the art museum, partially because to us it was the least interesting of the three options and partially because we’d be going to other art museums over the next couple days, but mostly because we spent so much time frolicking in the botanical gardens. This was the one day of our trip that was mostly sunny and warm, so it was an absolutely beautiful day to be outdoors.
Coming from Colorado, where March is still very much winter, the lush greenery and brightly colored flowers were a welcome sight.
I was also endlessly entertained by the palm trees, much to my sister’s embarrassment. What can I say? I haven’t seen a lot of palm trees in my life so the novelty is very much alive.
We began our botanical tour with a walk through the Japanese Garden, which included an extensive collection of bonsai trees in addition to numerous plants native to Japan.
From here, we followed a bamboo-lined path to the Chinese Garden, which is centered around a lovely pond.
There are many places to sit and eat (or just enjoy the view) throughout the gardens, so we stopped here for some lunch. We accidentally made it into the gardens with our own food which, as it turns out, is not allowed.
At security, the guy asked if we had any sandwiches with us; it seemed like an oddly specific question, but we didn’t have sandwiches so we answered no.
In retrospect, I think what he really meant was, “do you have food in your bag?” in which case the correct answer was yes.
Oops.
We were well into the gardens by the time we saw the ‘no outside food allowed’ sign, and given that no one had searched our bags and no one yelled at us when we sat on a bench to eat, they clearly don’t spend a lot of effort enforcing that rule.
In addition to the rose garden — most of which was closed when we visited — there is an Australian Garden, a jungle garden, and a subtropical garden.
My absolute favorite part, though, was the Desert Garden. I love succulents, and the entire garden was overflowing with various cacti, succulents, and other unique and colorful desert plants.
Huntington Gardens is enormous; plan to do a lot of walking during your visit. I wish I’d had my hiking tracker with me, because I know we covered many miles. By the time we finished, we were sweaty and our feet were very sore. But it was only about 2:00pm; my first day in LA was far from over.
While we were in Pasadena, my sister took me to the Pasadena City Hall, otherwise known as the exterior location of Pawnee City Hall in Parks and Rec.
We also drove past CalTech and a lot of street names I recognized from the early seasons of The Big Bang Theory. To locals, I’m sure seeing things in real life that you’ve seen on TV isn’t at all exciting, but for me it was kind of fun. So many TV shows and movies take place in LA, so it was neat to finally see the city and all these places I’ve heard about my whole life.
And we still weren’t quite done with our day. We had one more stop to make: the Griffith Observatory!
The observatory exists thanks to philanthropist Griffith J. Griffith (a name that very much amuses me) who donated the land and millions of dollars to the city of Los Angeles with instructions to build an observatory to increase the accessibility of astronomy to the general public. Per his wishes, admission remains free, though you do have to pay to park (unless all the machines are broken when you arrive, which is what happened for us… what a bummer).
I’d heard of the observatory and seen it on TV and in photos, but I didn’t realize it’s also a rather large museum, with extensive exhibits on the lower levels and a planetarium. I only wish it hadn’t been the very end of the day; between my 4:45am drive to the airport, the flight, and the hours spent at The Huntington, I didn’t really have it in me to read all the exhibits.
We did attend a planetarium show (admission required) called Signs of Life, which explored the locations throughout the universe that contain the necessary ingredients for life to exist.
I’ve been to quite a few planetarium shows, but this was the first one with someone narrating it live. When I pointed this out to my sister, she shrugged and said, “it’s Los Angeles.”
She makes a good point.
The observatory also has a Coelostat (pronounced SEE-low-stat), which is a collection of moveable mirrors — in this case, three of them — that follows the sun across the sky and projects a live image onto the screen. You can see the projection in the left photo below. The sun was slightly obscured by clouds so it’s not a very sharp image.
And that wraps up day #1 in Los Angeles. It was a great introduction to the city and I was looking forward to more.
But I’m going to leave off here for now; more to come next week!
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