Adventures in the USA: Rachel's Travel Diary

Good Morning World! It’s been a busy couple of weeks and I’ve only just realised that I forgot to post last week! So this post covers my highlights from the last two weeks!

Before I dive in, I hope everyone has a lovely and restful Easter. I’ve been enjoying a little Easter care package put together by my parents and transported by Chris’s parents!

As mentioned at the end of my last post, I did make it to the cheesecake factory. With 43(!!) varieties of cheesecake to choose from, it was a little bit overwhelming deciding which one to pick, and the slices are far too big to pict a couple and try a selection! I found a blog post online though where someone had sampled every flavour on offer (hopefully not all in one sitting!) and reviewed and ranked them, so I used this to inform my choice and eventually settled on the White Chocolate Raspberry Truffle – White chocolate cheesecake with a raspberry swirl on top of a dark chocolate cookie crumb base. I wasn’t expecting the towers of whipped cream on the top so I didn’t actually manage to finish even the one slice! There’s a few other flavours I’m curious about but I think next time I’ll pick a fruity one as the white chocolate was very rich! Either that, or I’ll have to order it to take away and split it over a couple of days.

I paired my Cheesecake Factory visit with a visit to the nearby Holocaust Museum. It’s a fairly small museum (albeit undergoing construction at the moment to build a new wing which will double their floorspace) but with a huge collection of physical and audio-visual artefacts documenting the lives of Jewish people in Europe prior to, during and after the Second World War. It’s a very well curated museum and fascinating to learn about from a North American perspective – several of the owners and curators are descendants from families who either fled Europe before the war began or are Holocaust survivors who left shortly after, and they’ve interwoven historical facts and news headlines with personal stories from survivors very well.

We decided against visiting Long Beach during the Grand Prix in the end on Saturday (12th April), but we did go to the nearby Seal Beach ahead of a performance of Into the Woods at the Carpenter Centre for Performing Arts. We were quite blown away by the performance – a beautiful and clearly well-funded theatre with an amazing cast and very cheap tickets! They even put on 5 free matinee performances for schools – 5000 young people got to see the show in total, paving the way for another generation of avid theatre-goers! On Sunday I woke up to the news that Cambridge had ‘completed the double’ again by winning both the men’s and the women’s Boat Races (hooray!). It was another beautiful day so we went for a walk up Runyon Canyon. It was Chris’ first time up the canyon and we couldn’t have asked for better weather for the occasion, although as usual the ‘marine layer’ was creating a fog-like haze over the city.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I took a few quiet days of sewing, planning and preparing for Chris’s parents who arrived on Wednesday (16th) for a week long visit. I’ve nearly finished sewing my new dress now, despite a few confusing instructions and a couple of attempts at getting the invisible zip to sit neatly (a little bit of hand stitching did the trick in the end). I just have to finish securing the lining, attaching the straps and sewing the hem and it will be ready to wear! I’ve also found a couple of nice yoga studios within walking distance of the apartment. I had looked up studios before but the overwhelming majority only run ‘hot yoga’ classes where the rooms are heated to quite high temperatures designed to make you sweat and burn more calories, but that’s never really appealed to me. Knowing the area a little bit better now though, I have managed to find styles of class that I enjoy so I’m looking forward to building that into my routine over the next couple of months.

We managed to squeeze a lot into the week with Chris’s parents. We had a good mixture of nature, science, museums and relaxing. We visited the Natural History Museum, the California Science Centre, the La Brea Farm Pits Museum and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. There’s a large construction project underway at the Science Centre which has already been going on for 18 months and has another 18 to go – they’re building a new Air and Space centre which will house several aircraft, space travel artefacts, and most excitingly the Endeavour space shuttle which has already been assembled vertically, complete with boosters and external fuel tank as if ready to launch off from Downtown LA into orbit any minute! They currently have an exhibit at the museum all about how the transported the Endeavor through the streets of LA to the museum site and how they then assembled the components of the shuttle, following the same sequence as at NASA launch facilities in other parts of the USA.

On the theme of Space, we also visited both the Griffith observatory and the Mount Wilson Observatory (located within the Angeles National Forest). As you would expect, both observatories are located at the top of hills/mountains for the clearest views, minimising light pollution and disruption communications signals. The Griffith observatory is much closer to the city and has a great view of the Hollywood sign, so that was very busy, but we were almost the only visitors at Mount Wilson (it also helped that it was a Monday and they don’t have public holidays for Easter here). We saw inside the 100 inch telescope which was used by Hubble to measure the size of the universe and confirm that the Milky Way isn’t the only galaxy in existence, and learned about how array telescopes can be used to mimic a much larger telescope (need to go away and read up more about how that works). It took me right back to my A-Level physics days, looking a ray diagrams of how the difference telescope arrangements work. We also found out that the Los Angeles Astronomical Society host frequent ‘Star Parties’ at the observatories around the city, where star gazing enthusiasts set up their telescopes and happily show you their favourite objects to observe in the night sky – we’re hoping to go to one of those soon.

We would have loved to spend more time in the local forests and mountains, but the time flew past and today Chris’s parents fly back to the UK. We did manage to fit in a few excellent meals – a favourite being at Castaway which is predominantly a steak restaurant, in the hills overlooking Burbank – on the recommendation of our waiter I opted for miso-marinated butterfish which was delicious, followed but a Key Lime Pie with two spoons for sharing. To round off the jam-packed week we also managed a trip to the Walt Disney Concert Hall to see members of the LA Philharmonic play a Mendelssohn string octet (which he wrote aged 16!) and a couple of other chamber music pieces. The concert hall is a truly beautiful and reminds me a little of Birmingham Symphony Hall and Royal Festival Hall, albeit a little smaller. It brought back fond memories of performing at the concert hall in Cambridge with my wind orchestra at university and it’s reminded me to get out my clarinet whilst I’m here. I didn’t fly it all the way here for nothing!!

Signing off now from across the pond,

Rachel x