22 January, American Airlines Flt 2409 to Dallas/Fort Worth

Los Angeles generally gets fairly bad raps from travellers, but we have always found it interesting, if a little hectic. This is our third trip and we are still able to find new things to see and do, along with a few perennial favourites that call us back.

Our hosts, Paul’s sister, Anne-Marie and her family, had never visited one of our favourites, the Pueblo de Los Angeles in the Downtown area. This little block or so of old buildings, some surviving from the early days of Mexican settlement of the area, is a time capsule that allows one to escape the craziness that is Downtown LA and experience a small slice of life as it was. Right at the centre of the old Pueblo is a small courtyard that is straight out of a 19^th century Mexican village.

The main attractions are centred on Olvera Street, where the largely Hispanic crowds browse market stalls selling every imaginable Spanish-themed souvenir. ’Hole in the wall’ eateries dispense authentic Mexican food alongside more up-market restaurants. On a very warm and sunny winter’s day, it was easy to forget that we were in the midst of sprawling LA. For an added bonus, we slipped across the road to Union Station, an authentic Art Deco experience. Although much smaller than other grand stations in the US, LA’s Union Station and its surrounds also have the power to transport visitors back to a different era, one in which it is easy to imagine the great movie stars of the 30’s and 40’s sitting in the First Class waiting area for the call to board the ‘Californian Zephyr’ for all points east. Voted tourist guides par excellence by the locals, we called the day a success.

 

 

A new discovery for us was the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, LACMA. On a previous visit, we had visited the Getty Art Museum, an architectural masterpiece, but a little disappointing from the art standpoint. The LACMA was a real find. Extremely well laid out, the collection was large enough to cover the full gambit of traditional and contemporary art without being so large as to be overwhelming. The Picasso and French Impressionists’ collections, two of our favourites, were particularly well represented. An enormous installation of rolling model cars and trains was not operating on the day of our visit. We may just have to go back!

We topped the day off with a quick visit to Rodeo Drive and a cruise through Beverly Hills.

Our trip to Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) this morning was a might stressful, with an accident on the I-405 causing our entrance to the Interstate to be temporarily closed. After crawling along in a six lane jam, we finally found an alternative route and made the deadline for our car hire drop-off with just seconds to spare.

While we have a much higher regard for LA than most travellers, we do share the almost universal dislike for (LAX). The place is a nightmare! Poorly signed, inefficient and overcrowded. Recent experiences of far more modern airports in Hong Kong, Osaka, Tokyo, Beijing and Shanghai have probably spoiled us.

 23 January, Little Rock Arkansas

Full-on driving day today, Dallas to Little Rock is about 600 kms, but on a US Interstate that distance is a bit of a doddle.

Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, DFW to the ‘in crowd’, makes LAX look like a Third World terminal. As with all things in Texas, it is enormous and yet amazingly efficient. For our arrival yesterday, the list of connecting flights out of Dallas took three arrival boards to display, but our luggage was on the turntable by the time we had walked through the mall-sized shopping and eating concession area. As with some other US cities, the hire car offices are located in a mammoth specialist centre located just off the airport proper. It all works like clockwork. Ten points DFW.

 

How we ever got around before GPS, we’ll never know. The freeway system around Dallas is complex, but because it has been well designed and built to cope with the traffic load, it moves fast! Well, we can’t complain about fast freeway traffic after our experience getting to LAX yesterday, but fast freeway traffic requires FAST reaction times, so when the GPS voice says, ‘in 300 metres take the exit 34, turn sharp left and enter the motorway, stay in the left lane, in 200 metres, exit right…’ you had better be on the ball when barrelling along at 120 kms/hr in 5 lanes of traffic. Not to crow too much, but we are getting much better at this after a lot of wrong turns and tense moments in the past between driver and navigator.

Our trip through East Texas and Arkansas was just a simple drive-through to achieve our first goal, Nashville. From what we have seen from the Interstate, we aren’t missing much. Guess the grey sky and sub-zero temperatures aren’t helping much, but it is only going to get worse over the next couple of days as an unusual weather pattern pushes Arctic air way down into the southern states. We expect -5C here in Little Rock for our departure tomorrow and -10C in Nashville. Even Florida has been experiencing some ice on windscreens! Lucky we aren’t in Chicago where it is -23C!

24 January, Nashville, TN.

Music City USA, home at last, home at last. Dramatic, but not really all that true. We are big fans of all sorts of music, country is just a bit of a new thing and the roots of this genre on our playlist lie in our visit to Nashville seven years back, when we did what you must do in Nashville and visited the Grand Ole Opry. Although we had heard and read of the Grand Ole Opry, we were probably further motivated by the movie, A Prairie Home Companion starring Meryl Streep. The experience was great fun and for years after we got home, we tuned in to the internet broadcast of the Opry Live.

So here we are to celebrate a significant birthday, in the way we have tended to do of late – the last big one was celebrated in Juneau, Alaska.

The last leg of our trip took us through Memphis and even though we were determined to just drive straight through to Nashville, express, we couldn’t resist the temptation for a quick drive-through of downtown Memphis. Ten minutes tops, and we had done the sights. We remembered our way around fairly well. We had risen to -13C this morning, so we were not too keen on a walk around. All looks good for tomorrow, sunny and all the way up to 5C maximum during the day and down to -5C for our big night out.  (By the way, our room was changed on check-in as level 2’s floors freeze, so here we are on level 4 with a lovely view of the state’s Capitol building.)