I Love L.A.

Got up and Continental Breakfasted the fuck out of our motel then hit the road. Hollywood here we come!



It was about a 3 hour drive into L.A. We met a really good buddy of mine from college, Ryan McCracken. He's freaking crazy.



We were crashing at his place Friday and Saturday night, so he was in charge of us. If anyone out there knows Ryan, they know that having him in charge will definitely keep things interesting. We met him and his girlfriend Mita. They had been playing frisbi golf and drinking all morning. Three of Mita's friends where along for the ride as well. We were hungry so they took us to this little Cuban sandwich shop. It was really good. Ryan said they had the best coffee in L.A., but at this point had already consumed way to much coffee. One more cup and either my heart would have exploded or I would have shit in my pants. Or both!

We decided to hang out at Mita's house for a while. Mita and her friends headed back to her place. Nancy, Ryan and myself set off to grab some beer on the way to Mita's. There was a shifty looking party store next to the place we got beer and Ryan decided the party needed a piñata, but not just any piñata, a freaking huge ass Curious George piñata.



The next stop was the grocery store to buy some candy to stuff into George's body cavity . Along with the candy we bought a package of super balls and three lottery tickets to go in the piñata. We finally made it to Mita's house. She lived in a little Latino neighborhood, I think it was called Los Angeles.



She had a really adorable place. Here's Nancy telling everyone where vampires bite people.



After filling the piñata with candy, me and Ryan filled it with a little sugar! Oh yeah!



Look at the determination and commitment in my piñata smashing face. I'm thinking of going pro.



George gets hit square in the gonads, and looses all his curiosity.




Things took a turn for the worse when the piñata insulted Ryan's mama.



This little guy was freaking out on our candy. Unfortunately we found him the next morning still stuck to the lollipop. He totally overdosed. Apple flavored suckers are like crack for bees. Sweet sweet crack.



After dismembering the piñata, we found fun ways to use it's lifeless limbs.



WARNING: The below image depicts graphically violent images of piñata cruelty. View at your own risk.



This is pretty disturbing as well. If you're afraid of midgets or piñata's then turn away now.



After destroying the paper mache monkey, Ryan told us we had to see the 3 foolish dogs that lived across the street.



The neighbor's yard was on a hill, and the dogs were able to hop up on top of the garage that faced the street. Anytime another dog would walk down the sidewalk, these three dogs hopped up on top of the garage and yapped it up. They had a specific order they sat in every time. It was really funny.



Fueled on beer and violence, the group wanted to walk down the street to this local bar and grab a drink. Ryan decided to take his beer with him, but he didn't have anything to wrap it in, so we improvised.



That's it for now, more L.A. soon!

Hearst Donut

Full of amazing food from Nepenthe, we set off down Highway 1 again. Just when you thought Highway 1 couldn't become any freaking scarier, it triples in scariness. For the next hour, I'm nervous as hell, Nancy is yelling at me for driving to fast, and I'm inches away from reenacting a scene from Toonses the Driving Cat. This road is so damn creepy it's unbelievable. Every 30 seconds there is a 20 to 30 mile an hour turn, and not one of those 20 to 30 mile an hour turns that you just laugh at in your home town as you roll up on two wheels. These 20 to 30 mile an hour turns will murder you and then hunt down your family.

We were supposed to be at Hearst Castle at 3:20 for our tour, so I was already nervous about missing our time slot. The GPS was telling me that we were going to be late. We roll up around 3:28 and walk into the Hearst Castle main building where you buy your ticket and souvenirs. We have 10 minutes before our bus leaves to go up to the castle.



I didn't think anything could be worse than driving on Highway 1, but taking a bus up an even steeper smaller road trumped it.



Hearst Castle is absolutely breathtaking. It's the house built by the guy upon which Citizen Kane was based, William Randolph Hearst. He was a crazy as hell, insanely rich newspaper tycoon.



Here is the tour guide. He was WAY to happy to be giving us this tour and knew WAY to much about William Randolph Hearst. He scared me.



Now I'm just going to plaster pictures of the place up, trust me, nothing funny happened on the tour and there isn't anything funny to say about the pictures, but they are really cool pictures. Here is the pool in front of the castle. Those are actual ancient roman columns.





Nancy pointed out how pissed off these geese looked.



Here are some more lovely pictures of the place. There were like three guest houses and then the main castle.









So basically Hearst would just buy random works of art, ancient sculptures and antiquities, then just throw them into any open space he had available. The tour guide said the main purpose of the mansion was to house his art collection. I thought this would be a great place to shoot an episode of Trading Spaces.

Living in New York for so long now, I just instinctively gave this statue a quarter.



Here are a couple more pics of the castle.




After our tour we watched an extremely cheesy 40 minute movie about Hearst and his castle. They actually had a theater in the main building where you get souvenirs. I give the film 2 stars.

Next we made our way to our motel. This was the first place we stayed that was actually right next to the beach.



It was our favorite place so far, except the bed was about 100 years old and very uncomfortable. I thought we should have hidden while we were on the tour of the castle and just stayed there.



Next we walk to a little bluff and pointed at stuff for about half an hour.




Then it was down the rickety stair case to the beach.




We wanted to watch the sunset.



We got bored waiting for the stupid ass sun to set, it took so long. Stupid sun.




Finally the sun got off it's lazy ass and set.



Then we drove to the little downtown area and found a quaint little pizza joint. The pizza was really good. Our long day was at a close and it was time to retire to our little motel by the beach.

Tomorrow...... Los Angeles!!!!!!!!!

Bubble bubble Toil and Trouble

OK, in the last blog about Monterey, I forgot to mention the funniest thing that happened. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of this occurrence, but I did have to get clearance from Nancy to talk about it. Here goes nothin!

We both noticed that our room at the Ramada Inn had a bathtub with those massaging jet thingies. So we thought we should take a bath together, but don't worry we wore our bathing suits. We started running the water and of course we both agreed that a bubble bath kicks a regular baths ass up and down the court all day long. We poured some shampoo in the water and the bubbles started to form.

Both of us hopped into the tub and got ready to relax after a long day of driving and walking. Neither one of us had ever worked one of these massaging jet bathtub things, and to our defense there wasn't any instructions anywhere. The water level was about half way submerging the jets, and I knew in the back of my head that we should probably wait until the water was completely over the jets. I got impatient and decided to start the fun early. I hit the button and the jets erupted with a burp and shot out a stream of water which hit my leg. This redirected the stream into a fountain that started spraying water all over the bathroom. I frantically try to turn the jets off, which didn't work right away. After some slippery screaming and scrambling I got the jets turned off.

We laughed it off and waited until the water level was high enough. It's at this point that I have to interject. The worst thing about bubble baths is there's never enough bubbles to make it seem super cool like in the movies. Well, we accidentally found a way to change that. We turned the jets back on, and they function properly. We sat back and let the jets massage us. After a minute or two we noticed the bubbles had doubled in volume. Then tripled. The bubbles are seriously enormous at this point and over taking the bathtub. It was like a horror movie, where an alien bubble monster was attacking two high-school kids. We realized that the jets were fueling the bubble production so we turned the jets off. Then we decide we wanted to see how big the bubbles would get. Let me just say that we could have filled our mile long hotel room with bubbles had we wanted.

It was crazy awesome, but I'm almost 100% positive that had there been instructions, it would have warned against any use of bubble bath and the jets at the same time.

After the awesome bubble bath we settled in for bed and stumbled across the Karate Kid on TV. We watched the rest of it and drifted off into dream land.

The next day we hit the Continental Breakfast, and I realized that we had become little homeless people at this point, scarfing down free food every chance we got.

Back in the Kia and off to San Simeon.

We were finally on the famed highway 1. It was an amazing drive. I can see now why so many drunk actors have lost their life on that stretch of highway. I was sober and still scared shitless. The highway almost dares you to drive off of it.

Here is a picture on the highest bridge in the world, or something like that, I can't remember. I was too busy trying not to see if our rental car could fly. I'm pretty sure we didn't pay for that feature, and we didn't rent the car from M.A.S.K.



We were driving for about an hour when I realized I had forgotten to get gas before we left Monterey. It was a tad bit tense in the car at this point considering we were driving on a highway where it would be physically impossible to have a gas station.

Our next stop was a national park in Big Sur that Nancy wanted to take a hike in. We make it there without running out of gas, but we're seriously running on fumes at this point. We ask the park ranger, who I swear to god was Lindsy Lohan, where was the next gas station. I guess people become park rangers for a reason, because this girl had the people skills of a dead raccoon. After sort of staring at us for a second she said it was 2 miles up the road. At this point I felt like Neo from The Matrix as the bullets flew by, just bearly missing me.



With our gas worries over, we paid 8 bucks to park, then bought a map of the trails for a buck. My argument was, for 8 bucks the map could have been free. So, map in hand, we were off to explore. And yes, the name of the trail was Creamery Meadow. Not sure what to say about that...



We decided to take the path less traveled, and that made all the difference, and by all the difference, I mean we got devoured by tigers.



Here I am posing for Adventurer Monthly.



Here are some random pictures from the trail.






This is the tree of life. It told us tails of nature and of mans unthinking selfish destruction of this beautiful land. Then I had to take a piss behind it and we continued on the trail.



We made our way down to the beach.



There was tons of seaweed on the beach.



I noticed something weird about this pile, but couldn't ever put my finger on what was strange about it.



I stood in one place and slowly turn all the way around and took 15 pictures so I could try and make a 360 degree picture. It was a pain the ass putting it together in photoshop, but it totally worked.



We made our way back to the car and immediately went to the gas station. There was only two pumps and we pulled up behind these douche bag bikers that weren't even filling up anymore. They just stood there and talked while we waited behind them. I almost went Billy Jack on their asses, but then I realized they were probably accountants and lawyers and would have sued the shit out of me for assault. I did manage to get an awesome picture of one of their old ladies in her leather jacket with kick ass fringe everywhere.



Next stop was lunch at a place that was right on the side of the mountain. Everyone familiar with this drive recommended this place to us. And after eating there, I too must recommend this amazing restaurant to everyone making this journey. It was absolutely fantastic. One of the best hamburgers I've ever had. The place is called Nepenthe. Here are some pictures of the place. You can't see the view that well because the camera didn't pick up detail in the background, and it was a little foggy that day. The view looked fine if you were using your eyes however, and it was great.






See how happy this place made us.



Here is what we had for desert. Banana cream pie and capuchino.



Here is an artsy picture of our desert.



Remember those asshole bikers? Here's their asshole biker dog.



I have to break this day up into two blogs, next time I will conclude this day, and someone will die! (Scary Music Plays)