I spent a long weekend in LA, visiting my most favorite of daughters, Abi.  To be clear, she is my only daughter, so there isn’t much competition, but still, I want her to know that she is my favorite of the female children. 😉

I arrived Friday around lunch time and Abi & I quickly established the rules for the weekend.  Our primary tasks were…think about eating, plan to eat, eat, discuss what we ate and then start again. We managed to cover most of the important food groups – deli in Beverly Hills, Mexican at a place that had only outdoor seating (not a real option in Chicago), Thai at a place where the food came out in what I would charitably call random order (some main courses, then appetizers, then rice, then the rest of the main courses),  a posy breakfast place where the food was great, but I needed my secret decoder ring in order to understand what I ordered, popcorn at the movies rather than dinner …and of course In-N-Out Burger.

We did some other non-eating stuff.

The weather was “unusual” for Southern California–50s and cloudy and some rain. I had to wear long pants and a COAT! Well, really a light windbreaker, but it was far from what I was hoping for (80s and sunny). Oh well.

We went to Topanga Canyon and hiked up to Eagle Rock. It is a pretty easy hike, wide and smooth “trail.” It was a bit crowded, but not too bad. If you look at the photos in the hyperlink, you will notice that there is lot of brown. Due to all the rain, the trail was beautifully green. Abi was amazed and stopped multiple times to explain that she was unused to seeing that color. For those of you from So. Cal, the white things in the photo covering up some of the blue sky are called clouds.

On Saturday night, we went to the Improv in Hollywood to see a bunch of comedians.  The headliner was Brent Weinbach, who was hilarious.  We were seated in the front row so we expected that someone would make fun of us, but no such luck. Abi had to read a couple of things for Brent, but that was about it. It was a great night.

On Sunday we went to a flea market right in West Hollywood.  Only in California would a flea market have mandatory valet parking.  Nothing too exciting, but I did manage to find three pairs of socks for Sue.  One each of In-N-Out Burger (great for her vegetarian status–I know, I am hoping I don’t get defrocked), Hot Cheetos and Tabasco.

We also went to LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), which I have so say was a bit disappointing. There was a long wait to get tickets, then the Japanese building was closed. There were two interesting exhibitions. One on the 100th year of the Bauhaus school, including about half a dozen Kandinsky’s that I really liked. The second was the Art of Sri Lanka, once again, very interesting, but both were relatively small.  They did do a very nice job of explaining the exhibits, which I really appreciated.