“you’re a virgin who can’t drive.”

hi everyone! this is going to be another long one because i know i let you all (mom) down by not blogging yesterday. but before we start, for some reason i can’t make it this far into the blog command center from my computer, so i’m blogging from maura’s, which means no pictures in the post. i know that disappoints some of you, and i apologize for that, but you’re going to need to stop crying and move on. but read the post first! and this is the perfect opportunity to suck it up and check out all the flickr pictures.

okay, now on to the stories: we finished up in san francisco with an awesome bbq that lucy totally commandeered and blew us all away. there were regular burgers, turkey burgers, skewered vegetables, pasta salad, mashed potatoes, wine, beer, and five awesome ladies. then lucy, mariel, and jamie went out and partied it up while catie and i stayed in and watched “the real housewives of new york city”, which is definitely not one of the BEST shows on the face of the planet, but you know i’ll probably watch anyway when we get home.

so the next morning we left for LA, and the drive was totally boring. and smelly. cow manure is disgusting, especially when its smell is wafting onto the highway. gross. the only interesting part of the whole thing was the windmills, really. freaky. in a good way, obviously. but we made it to the city and because maura (my bffaeaeae and person putting is up for the next few days) wasn’t getting home from work until seven, we decided to stop at a coffee shop and hang out and wait. but god forbid it be that simple. first of all, LA doesn’t allow street parking between 3 and 7 pm (where we were at that time), and it was 430 when we got there. bummer. then, i took a turn to go into a parking garage, and it was something like $9 for 30 minutes of parking. f that. but by that time we couldn’t back out so we had to be $3 to sit in a parking lot for five minutes decided what we should do when we leave. lame. either way, we decided to just go to maura’s to figure stuff out since her neighborhood would be a lot more residential and a lot less scary, and when we got there she recommended (via phone) chango’s, a coffee shop pretty close to her house. so we hung out there reading ‘the onion’ until morgan (maura’s roommate) got home from work.

we happened to come to LA on ‘margarita night’ day, so that was pretty cool. we went to masa’s for paninis and salads first, and then headed to barragan’s (sp?) for the $2.25 drinks. jonah hill was there. totally met him. no biggie.

and then yesterday we planned all sorts of touristy goodness. we went to chango’s again for coffee while we tried to decipher the tourbook we have. we decided to (slightly) wing it, so we headed over to rodeo drive. then when we realized there are TWO rodeo drives, and we were not on the right one, we went to the real one. we were all slightly unimpressed. i mean, obviously it was cool and over the top and stuff, but it was pretty much all the same stores you could find in nyc. obviously we took a ton of pictures, but we were all kind of over it by the time we got to the intersection of rodeo and wilshire. whatevs.

then we met up with another swampscottian (?), dave racki, who took us on the best tour of LA i’ve ever been on. he took us to a great pizza place near his house in hollywood, then we basically just sat in the car while he told us everything there was to know about the sunset strip, hollywood and santa monica boulevards, mulholland drive, and the hollywood and beverly hills. we got to see the walk of fame, and mariel bought a map of the stars’ houses, and we saw grauman’s and all the crazy ripley’s and guinness stuff (from the outside, of course), and we go the driving tour of the strip where are the famous restaurants and stuff are. not one famous person, though! kind of weird.

when we went up into the hills, we spent at least 30 minutes trying to go “up and right” (towards the hollywood sign) as racki kept calling it, and we fiiiiinally made it! we really did get surprisingly close. but who got more surprisingly close? the three deaf girls we ran into climbing down the hill who told us they “touched the ‘d’”. um… okay. we all TOTally believed them until dan samiljan totally shot the whole thing down and said it’s practically impossible. so anyway we obviously found the one road that takes you right back down to the bottom of the hills, no problem, and it was obviously sunset and gorgeous, and then we obviously got stuck in traffic forever.

then we saw a crazy car accident heading back to racki’s… some moron flew through a blatantly red light. it wasn’t a huge thing, it’s just always kind of weird to be that close to an accident. MOM DON’T READ THIS PART it was the car next to us that hit the moron. he just pulled out for the green light a little sooner than we did. creepy. OKAY IT’S FINE NOW so we made it back to racki’s in one piece, where we met up with dan and maura, and then we all left with their friend josh to get something to eat at the village idiot. super high ceilings, super good beer, super fun. and then for even MORE fun, maura took us to out the shortstop (bar) for a couple of drinks after that. and there was a photobooth. and it was awesome. but what was more awesome was giant dorky creepy white guy dancin’ it up in the room we were sitting in. pretty phenomenal, i must say. and he was only one of many dorky creepy white guys doing that. he just happened to be the only one that was giant. but yeah the dj’s were playing oldies remixes and i’m a total sucker for that so we all had a great time! the photobooth pictures will be included in the polaroid album i put up when we get home and i can scan everything.

so the agenda today is basically just to get as many people who don’t know each other together in one place! we’re meeting up with mariel’s friend nancy, lucy’s friend jarrett, and mariel’s and my friend leigh (another aib-er). they’re all in or near the santa monica area, so seeing as how it’s going to be almost 80 degrees today, we figured we’d beach it up and bring everyone along for the ride.

ps as of yesterday afternoon, we’re halfway through the trip!