A Nice Long Breakation

Well.

As far as big pictures go, things are just outright refusing to give us a break, aren’t they? I’m not even going to bother with a recap, because what are the chances that someone would find this blog and not somehow have access to the whole entire rest of the internet, or radio, or television? What I’m going to do instead is give you all the same break I recently gave myself. Or, at least, a recount of the break I recently gave myself.

That’s right, friends and neighbors, I just got back from a vacation, which means it’s time to tell you all about it! This time around, I indulged myself and a lovely traveling companion in a visit to Universal Studios in Holollywood Calalifornia (about 500 miles west of my favorite natural wonder, the Grandadadadaaa Canyonananaaa.) Come with me, won’t you, as I try and remember enough things to fill a page or two as entertainingly as I can.

Arrival- We arrived fairly late in the evening and, after making our way to the outside of the Los Angeles International Airport, ordered what was to be my first ever Lyft ride, which involved watching our driver cruise right by us and subsequently waiting for him to circle all the way around the maliciously designed mobius strip from the hateful depths of the soulless abyss departure/arrival/parking/drop-off infrastructure of said airport, then discovering that our journey would be taken with not only our driver, but a fellow in the passenger seat who never spoke to us, instead limiting himself to a few obscenity laden statements about traffic and updates from the news in what I can only assume was an effort to distract our driver from the near collision and honked horn filled route, which in total lasted almost as long as this sentence.

We then arrived at our hotel, which was quite pleasant, and slept.

Day 1- We decided to spend our first day doing the non theme park tourist stuff, and so went first to the La Brea Tar Pits. Instead of again employing an oddly named but totally hip taxi service, we elected to avail ourselves of the public transportation system. This journey began, as so many do, with us downloading multiple apps and finding out that there was no particularly convenient way for us to pay pre-purchase our bus fare, and we would instead have to not only use cash, but exact change, like barbarians.The journey itself was exceptionally unexceptional, including only one transfer, no outwardly aggressive crazy people, and the two of us disembarking only one stop early.   

After walking a little farther than we potentially would have been required to, we arrived at the tar pit area. The park itself is lovely, and the pit we saw was a small pond inside of which were bubbling black pools of tar, and only one very small island of garbage.Very much a smaller scale of what I imagine the Gulf of Mexico to look like, except for statues at one end of the pond which depicted a three member Mastodon family in the middle of losing one parent to the tar. My lovely traveling companion and I were particularly struck by this recreation, as the artist(s?) had done an outstanding job of expressing the horror and trauma felt by the Mastodon child.

That poor statue kid is permanently having the worst day of it’s life, and its pain was On Display.

From this horrific scene we ventured into the museum, which is super cool and full of skeletons that have been pulled out of the tar pits, some of which you can even touch, but be careful, because it is not always easy to discern which ones. For example, at one point, a young employee proffered unto me a Sabre-toothed Cat skull, but then quickly informed that I could not touch it. Even though he practically shoved it in my face and begged me to take it home with me. We also observed a wall on which were placed 404 dire wolf skulls, which was really cool, and heard an older couple complain that these dire wolves did not resemble the ones on “Game of Thrones”, and also that these wolves must have been pretty stupid, to get caught up in those pits. The male half of this couple also treated us to a display of his lower belly, which spilled out of his shirt as he leaned back to take a picture, a detail I provide only to remind you that stupidity is relative, and people are gross.

We spent the rest of the afternoon walking along Hollywood Boulevard, looking at stars in the ground with famous names on them, checking out what is essentially the exact same souvenir shop recreated endlessly in order to fill out spaces between the restaurants and bars, and doing our level best not to come into physical contact with any member of the great mass of humanity that mills about in that area of town.

We aso learned that my lovely traveling companion has a hairstyle that is quite the envy of many members of said mass, as well as Wonder Woman. Oh, and there was also lots more drivers honking horns at one another, which I began to suspect was some sort of mating call.

We then returned to the hotel, and slept.

Day 2- Day one at Universal Studios! We arrived early, to beat the lines, and headed straight for Harry Potter world, which did not disappoint. I don’t want to give away too much, but I will say that, while it’s not exactly huge, the two major rides are totally fun, and the recreation of Hogsmeade has that whole wizarding world spirit pretty intact. Also, “Butterbeer” is cream soda with a little bit of extra butterscotch, and it’s delicious.

From there we went to the Simpsons area of the park which, for a lifelong (first ten seasons) Simpsons fan like myself, was just as great as strolling through Hogsmeade. We stopped off at Krusty Burger for a Krusty Burger, which was fine, and went to Moe’s for a Duff, which was also fine. It’s really more about the experience than the quality of the comestibles.

We also went to the “Walking Dead” walkthrough attraction, which was thoroughly enjoyable, and even had my favorite part of every haunted house style attraction: that guy in the group (this time it was the group right in front of us) who refuses to admit to being scared, because he’s so tough. Telltale signs of this person included, in this case, staying way behind his friends so that all the zombies would jump out at them and not him, rushing forward after they jump out to show how not scared he was, stopping to look around every corner with right fist clenched and halfway cocked, and then, once he emerged from the totally not scary maze, making fun of his friends for all the times they were frightened.

At this point, the park was getting pretty crowded, so we decided to save the remaining attractions for-

Day 3- We once again arrived at the park early, and made tracks to the Harry Potter rides again. From there we blasted through the “Jurassic Park” Ride, and the Mummy’s Revenge ride, which was probably based on the movie(s), but didn’t really have much to do with anything except a bunch of mummies and an exceptionally fun coaster, so no quote marks for it. We also went on the 3D “Transformers” ride, which probably would be fun if one cared at all about those movies, but these two did not, so it mostly just felt like we were in the back of a poorly driven car during a destruction derby and being forced to watch clips from an expensive and mindless CG movie about robots with boring and/or offensive personalities. We also went on a “Despicable Me” based ride, during which we briefly turned into minions, taken on a fun little adventure, and then reverted back to human form before being released, and we took a short ride on a flying bug, the rise of which we could kind of control with a joystick. This was the area of the park designed for kids, so I’ll keep its description appropriately short.

We ended our time in the park with a “Waterworld” themed stunt spectacular, which had lots of folks on jet skis, and a bunch of explosions and fire. So, it was at least as good as the movie.

Day 4- We spent the last day of our vacation doing very little, barely leaving the hotel room, except for a very short jaunt down to the pool, which was too cold to stay in for more than maybe two minutes. We ordered a pizza and watched episodes of “Arrested Development”, and it was relaxing and great. I could go on about this day for some time really, but vacations to me are a wonderful way to build some memories with people, even if that person is just oneself, so I’m going to keep the finer details of this day just for me and my lovely travel companion.

So there you have it, folks, a not terribly short recreation of my vacation for your placation during this particularly rough time in this already not the best ever year. I know it’s not going to change anything that’s happened recently, and it’s not anywhere near as enjoyable as going on your own vacation, but I hope it at least bought you a few minutes of respite from thinking about the whole entire rest of everything.

-John