So much to do...

Yesterday I noticed a rattle in the back of my car. As first, I was a little disconcerted thinking that the spare tire cover had come loose, but then I quickly remembered that the slight clanking was my newly acquired beach chairs. Yes...I own beach chairs because I am now a southern Californian. Whatever one may think of LA proper, there is a vast and delightful world beyond the boundaries of the city. While getting to that world may require Herculean efforts, it is there nonetheless. Since we have been here, we have already been hiking in the mountains and spent a day lounging on the beach. The ability to do both within a day’s drive is a delightful change for a water girl who has spent the last five years landlocked.

I am continually amazed at the diversity here in LA that evidences itself in almost every arena. The variety of cultures that co-exists leads to a panoply of languages and food that is rivaled by few places. But the diversity is not just multi-cultural in the sense we have come to learn. There is also a diversity of lifestyle that ranges from beach bum to ranch hand to swanky Hollywood chic. We are currently living in Burbank, a town where many places bear the name “media city,” and Jay Leno’s nightly show and the Warner Brothers studios are right down the road. A short drive around Griffith Park (home of the Griffith Observatory), and you are in Los Feliz, a trendy area that boasts one of the best bookstores in LA (skylightbooks.com) and some equally wonderful-looking food. Only twenty minutes north is the La Canada area, a community full of well-to-do lawyers and doctors that looks a lot like most suburban neighborhoods in the rest of America with a Target and a aTrader Joe’s, but where the price tags on homes usually include the words “point” and “million.” And in and among each of these areas is everything else you could imagine.

If you drive an hour to an hour and a half in any direction, you are in either mountains, desert, or on the beach. Some people here drive every weekend up to a ranch to ride horses in the desert. Others do what we did last weekend and load up the beach chairs and umbrella and head down to the water for a day to just chill. And others stay in the city to have an early afternoon brunch at one of the many breakfast places that have a line stretching out the door and around the block.

Pretty much, whatever you want to do in LA, you can do. It may take you awhile to get there, but even with the traffic, it’s a lot quicker to get to the sand and surf from Burbank than it is from Denver, and this ocean girl is pretty happy about that.