A trip to Los Angeles

I went to LA for an extended weekend to attend a graduation and celebrate dad's 65th birthday.


I drove down with the family (8 in the Expedition) and flew back - it's a really long story of how the plans transpired but this was somewhat of a compromise. The drive down was very very very long. I can't believe I agreed to it considering I knew the parental figures would take advantage of the opportunity. I had wanted to borrow a mp3 player from H but was told that I should enjoy the conversation. So I kept borrowing the i-pods from the kids in the back row when I needed to block the parental issues out.


I-pods, hand held games and cell phones have differently made family road trips a whole new experience. Everyone in the car, at one point or another, was in a conversation on their cell.


We arrived in LA at around 10:30 pm (we had left the Bay Area around 4pm) and went out for dinner, after that we went to my sisters place for the night.


On Saturday, my sister and I got an early start and went to pick up a gift for dad's birthday, we decided on a laptop and picked that up.


We headed out to the campus after lunch. We had a lot of time to check out the campus and the surrounding areas given that the graduation was at 6pm. Westwood is the college town around the campus - it has some fun stores, so we walked around there for a bit. Saw this bag at a gift store there - pretty funny.



The graduation was at 6pm and we were to arrive at 5:30pm. Surprisingly enough the whole caln was actually on time - early even. We were seated well before the start of the ceremony. The ceremony was in the basketball stadium on campus - it was huge - pictured below. The program was well planned to keep people engaged and the whole thing took less that 2 hours - they were incredibly efficient in getting the grads up on stage with 2 announcers calling the names.



We went to dinner after the ceremony to a restaurant called El Cholos, it was a very nice place and the food was very good as well. There we celebrated both the graduate and my dad's birthday. My sister had picked up 2 cakes and saffron ice cream for desert. All in all it was a great celebration and everyone seemed to have had a good time.

On Sunday we all went to lunch to celebrate father's day and after that everyone went on their way. The Bay area contingent started their drive back. I went back to my sister's place with her and her DH. We vegged for a while and then went for a movie - saw Ocean's 13. While the movie wasn't on my to watch list, I was surprised I did enjoy it. I didn't much care for Ocean's 12.

Monday my sister went to work and I hung around her place with her dog. We played ball for a while - he is such a good dog. Everytime I threw the ball, he would bring it back and sit with it like in the photo. When I played ball with him indoors - he kept returning to this particular rug and would wait there.

I went shopping and visited Santa Monica for the rest of the Monday. Picked up my sister at work and then we went to dinner and then to the airport to catch my flight back.

It was nice to be away for a while and not have work on the mind.