Tag: travel
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Hollywood History walking tour
This morning I took the LA Metro to Hollywood and Vine, the meeting place of another Downtown LA Walking Tour, Hollywood History. The name of the tour company is kind of a misfit here as Hollywood is not located downtown. The first thing anyone should know about Hollywood Boulevard is — if the two wax…
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Arts District tour
Yesterday afternoon I took a tour of LA’s Arts District from Downtown LA Walking Tours. I had the same tour guide as I did when I took the Chinatown and Little Tokyo tour on my last visit, and as it turns out he’s intimately familiar with the local art scene through his other job as…
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Grand Central Market
On my last visit to LA I kept kicking myself for not taking any photos of Grand Central Market, the big local food hall downtown. It’s also one of the best food halls I’ve ever been to and I have some recommendations. So here we go. Opening at 8 AM, a handful of vendors serve…
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Pershing Square
Just like my last visit to Los Angeles I’m staying near Pershing Square, a public plaza spanning an entire city block. I’ve also found it’s a convenient orientation point when I’m not quite sure where something is located in downtown LA. The square is named after American WWI general John J. Pershing. Though he was…
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The Last Bookstore’s upstairs labyrinth
On my last trip to LA I just sort of stumbled across The Last Bookstore, a large bookstore selling new, used, antique, and rare books and comic books as well as vinyl records. Both times I wandered in I was a little distracted by well-attended events they were holding in the store with authors and…
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LA’s Union Station
It’s been almost two years since my last visit to Los Angeles, a trip I accidentally over-planned to the point where I had three times as much stuff to do as I did time to do it. So today I’ve returned for a few nights in an attempt to cross a few more of those…
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The Peanuts statues of Santa Rosa
All over Santa Rosa’s downtown I stumbled across statues in the likeness of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts characters (Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, etc.) They’re all about the same height, but made from different materials and from different artists. These were all commissioned after Schulz’s death in 2000, apparently because he didn’t like the idea of statues…
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Cyclisk
Easily the strangest thing I saw on this trip was the “Cyclisk,” an obelisk made of around 340 damaged bicycles. It was created by Mark Grieve and Ilana Spector as a public art project for Santa Rosa. Ironically the statue is next to a car dealer and a car wash, but Grieve says “The statement…
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Luther Burbank Home and Gardens
I arrived in Santa Rosa this afternoon and made a beeline for the Luther Burbank Home and Gardens. It’s the site of the home and a test garden of the wildly prolific horticulturist Luther Burbank. I bought a ticket for the hourly tour. Although not a household name, Burbank invented a number of common foods…
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Petaluma’s temperance fountain
I happened to walk by a stone drinking fountain in downtown Petaluma with a curious inscription on the side: ERECTED 1891 TOTAL ABSTINENCEIS THE WAY TO HANDLETHE ALCOHOL PROBLEM It seemed odd at first glance, I think mostly because the word “abstinence” is generally only used in modern American English by religious zealots peddling unscientific…
About Eric
Travel, movies, comedy, tech, and whatever I find on the streets of San Francisco.
Contact: mrericsir “at” gmail.com
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