Back from LA

We're back from our trip to the west coast. Among other events, we went to a wedding celebration for Abby's cousin

and took in a Dodgers-Cubs game on Sunday.

Rather than post an entire chronicle of our trip, I figure that I'll write about a few main themes.

Long distance air travel with the kid

Our flights actually worked out ok. On the way to LA, Margaret had one sustained meltdown after sleeping for the first 1.5 hour. It probably lasted about 15 minutes, but who knows since, as Abby pointed out, time stands still when your kid is screaming at the top of her lungs. We calmed her down with a cookie that a stewardess dropped off and spent much of the rest of the trip feeding her graham crackers. In fact, one of our main lessons from the flights was the importance of food as a distraction. On the way back, she ate so many bagels that we started telling her that she was going to turn into a big bagel.

The other lesson is that it's useful if you can get the kid in her car seat. On the way home while checking in, we asked whether any free seats were available and, if so, whether we could grab the seat for Margaret. The saints at Alaska Air set us up so that we were able to get the one free seat on the plane in between us (they also piled most of the young kids at the back of the plane - they're not idiots.) Thus, Margaret spent the entire flight hanging out in her car seat. One of my colleagues suggested that trick since kids seem to be accustomed to being in their car seats, but like to squirm and exert their independence when they're on papa's lap. She slept for 2.5 hours on the way back and then woke up (and woke me up by yanking on my hair - I jerked awake to big blue eyes and a smile as she poked me) to eat her bagels for the rest of the trip. All in all, she was a real champ.

Jetlag with a baby

Our first night in LA, Margaret slept great. She woke up at 6:30 which would've been ideal had it been 6:30 AM PST. Instead, she popped up at 3:30 AM PST (i.e. 6:30 AM EST) which was the start of a difficult weekend for sleep. She never really got straightened out, but managed to stretch out her nighttime sleep spells for long enough that we weren't completely wiped out. It will, however, be interesting to see how she adjusts to the return to EST.

Thoughts about LA

I've been to San Diego twice, but this was my first trip to LA. After leaving, I'm torn about the place which seems to be a common response given some of the promo material I read in our hotel room about the "two faces of LA." On the one hand, the weather was amazing. Warm and sunny, but simultaneously cool with no humidity, bugs or any of the other things that plague places like DC. While filling up our rental car before returning it, I saw a weather report in which the weatherman forecasted 70 high - 56 low (+/- one degree in each direction) and sun for the coming week. Hanging out in the garden of Abby's uncle and aunt was unbelievable - a smell and feel in the air that was crisp but warm with lots of roses and other flowers. (A number of times, I asked people about whether the oranges in the gardens were any good only to get a nonchalant and apathetic shrug - I'd be eating those oranges everyday!) No concerns about whether it would get too hot or humid, no worries about whether it would be cloudy and rainy, just a sense of sun and comfortable warmth that permeates everything. Truly sublime.

But LA is also an abomination in some ways (abomination is probably too strong of a word, but basically LA has certain features that shouldn't exist in that area.) Flying across the western US, one sees nothing but desert (albeit interesting desert like the Grand Canyon which spurred other passengers to peer through my window past Margaret.) All of a sudden, one hits LA. And habitation. And sprawl. Sprawl that rivals Chicago in its scale from an airplane window. Homes, warehouses and, most of all, highways as far as the eye can see. At least, that is, until the smog that initially lies below the plane starts to envelope it at which point the distant mountains become less visible and the focus of everything becomes soft.

Then the traffic after leaving the airport. While driving in the HOV lane, I asked Abby whether all of the cars in the other lanes really had only one passenger. Yep for the most part, she said after checking a few.

And how are all of the gardens in San Marino so lush? Because they water them a lot. In the middle of the afternoon. Where do they get their water? And why, I wondered, do they water their lawns and gardens at the peak of the day's heat when the systems are clearly automated and could be set to water anytime including the middle of the night when the water would be much more effective?

The Cubs-Dodgers game

The Dodgers game that we attended embodied all of the problems with LA. People kept telling us about the beautiful setting of Dodgers Stadium. But to get there, we had to fight a traffic jam into the park since, it would appear, there's no good way to get to the park other than driving (so unlike Wrigley where we walked to almost every game or, at worst, took the EL.) The view from our seats (admittedly in beautiful sunshine) involved parking lots and dry, brownish hills beyond them. (Another gripe - the concessions were pathetic with lines that took an inning to get through.) I kept wondering about how nightmarish the post-game traffic would be. Luckily, despite the fact that we witnessed a good portion of a great pitchers duel, Margaret had a complete and utter meltdown in the 7th inning (as I told Abby's cousin Tyler, the whole game had been like watching a train wreck in slow motion since you could see Maggie getting more and more tired) so we left, with Margaret screaming the entire way until she got in her car seat and promptly zonked out, and beat the traffic.