Petersen

Started: 2024-04-07 20:24:38

Submitted: 2024-04-09 22:55:29

Visibility: World-readable

A last-minute trip to Los Angeles, featuring a car museum packed with movie cars; the perfect place to represent America's love affair with the automobile

My plan for the kids' spring break on the first week of April was to visit the Trinity Test Site open house at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, but this plan did not survive contact with Oppenheimer.

Visiting the site during one of its open houses has been on my todo list since at least 2019, but the timing never quite lined up with my kids' school breaks until this year. In January this year I bought plane tickets to Albuquerque for the open house, then turned my attention to other things. It wasn't until two weeks before the open house that I looked it up again to make my final plans and learned that the open house had been canceled because the Army was overwhelmed by visitors in the fall. (They apparently announced the cancelation a week after I bought my plane tickets, but I didn't see the news. In early March, United sent me an email telling me that they had changed the aircraft on my flight, downscaling it from a mainline A320 to a regional E175, which might have been a signal that they no longer saw as much demand into Albuquerque without the open house.)

I could still go to Albuquerque (or Santa Fe, or elsewhere in New Mexico within driving distance) but without being able to visit the Trinity test site, I decided to cancel my trip. (I'd still like to visit the site, if the missile range holds another open house and comes up with a plan to manage demand.)

This left me with a two-day hole in my vacation schedule, and I still wanted to go somewhere, so I started looking at last-minute flights. Google Flights helpfully reminded me that I should have made my last-minute travel arrangements in advance for better prices. The fifth or sixth destination I checked was Los Angeles; there are dozens of flights daily between the Bay Area and the greater LA area, leading to enough supply to keep prices relatively low. I booked a trip leaving on Thursday and returning on Saturday, giving us enough time to see a movie studio tour and a few other things. I took Calvin and Julian with me, and left Kiesa at home.

It was raining on Thursday morning, the 4th of April, as I drove over the mountain to SJC. I kept an eye on traffic before leaving for the airport, in case there was a collision on highway 17, but traffic kept moving all morning. (The risk of traveling on highway 17 is that, 5% of the time, there's a collision or other incident that makes the drive take twice as long as normal.)

Calvin didn't get up early enough to eat breakfast before leaving, so we stood in a long line at the one open coffee shop in terminal 2 to get him breakfast. By the time we made it to the gate they were boarding the flight, and the overhead bins were already full so I gate-checked my carry-on suitcase holding all of our clothing for three people for two days. San Jose to Los Angeles is a short flight; we were only in the air for 59 minutes. Flight tracking indicates we spent 39 minutes taxiing on the ground; including the time we spent waiting for the plane to depart and waiting to exit the plane, we probably spent more time in the plane on the ground than in the air.

The first part of the flight, as we climbed out of San Jose, was bumpy; the plane didn't really calm down until we reached cruising altitude. Clouds covered the ground as we flew south down the long axis of California; we didn't see the ground until we broke through the clouds around DTLA. I spotted the Los Angeles River running with runoff from the spring rains in its concrete culvert. When we landed on runway 24R I saw delicate orange wildflowers blooming in the grass next to the runway, reminding me of the flowers I saw next to the runway in 2019.

When I picked up my rental car, the agent asked if I would be ok with an EV, and I said sure. (I was only planning on driving to Burbank and back, so I figured I could get there on whatever charge I had.) I ended up with a 2023 Hyundai Ioniq 5, a weirdly angular vehicle somewhere in the crossover/small-SUV space with more than enough room for three people and one small suitcase. I picked up the car with a 28% charge, which the dashboard helpfully interpreted as a 68-mile range.

Los Angeles is a city that has fully realized the glorious promise of a taco truck on every corner, giving us plenty of choices for lunch around LAX. I found a taco truck in a parking lot around the corner from the rental car pickup and we ate lunch, only slightly awkwardly hunched over the take-out containers in the car.

I drove north on surface streets to the Petersen Automotive Museum on Wilshire, across the street from La Brea Tar Pits and LACMA. The charging station on the ground floor of the parking garage was full, so I didn't get the chance to (slowly) charge my car at one of the type 2 AC chargers. (Type 2 chargers are rated up to 10 kW, which is great for overnight charging, but kind of underwhelming for a couple hours' charge in a parking garage. A good home charger will use a 220 volt circuit for an overnight charge.)

We started on the museum's third floor, which started out with a display of the evolution of rubber tires starting with bicycle tires and moving into automotive tires, with a brief outing to a pair of tires built for the lunar rovers. The glowing tire in the bottom right of the picture was apparently a real production tire, built with lights embedded in the tire to glow through the translucent sidewalls, but the rubber wasn't as durable as the opaque tires we're used to, so they were quickly discontinued. (This seems like something poised for a comeback, with remotely-operated color-changing LEDs.)

The main exhibit on the third floor was a long line of cars used in movies, including a 1976 Chevrolet Camaro from the first Transformers movie. My favorite was the Lincoln Towncar from The Matrix, complete with its fake weathered generic "Metropolitan" license plate (a generic license plate for a generic simulated city).

(The Matrix turned 25 last week. A quarter century, it makes one think.)

Julian's favorite car was the Batmobile, built by the studio after filming the 1989 Batman directed by Tim Burton. Around the corner was a full-scale model of Lightning McQueen, built by Pixar to promote Cars, set up in front of a backdrop depicting the Los Angeles speedway from the movie's third act. Calvin watched this movie dozens (hundreds?) of times as a small child, and still remembers it fondly.

There were more cars on the third floor, most of them restored and polished until they practically glowed. (One car was presented in considerably worse shape, representing the condition it was in when it was pulled from a junkyard, with the front bucket seat disintegrating and the dashboard falling off, supported only by the steering column.) The second floor had a large Porsche exhibit, including some early racing models, and production models owned by various people.

My favorite car in the entire museum was the centerpiece of the last gallery on the second floor, a spectacular stretched Rolls-Royce coupe with one huge round door on each side. This was an amazing one-of-a-kind custom car, from an era where Rolls-Royce delivered the chassis and let owners build their own body and interior. The chassis was originally built in 1925, then the shell and interior were rebuilt in 1934 into an Art Deco masterpiece, reminding me of a streamlined steam locomotive from the same era.

It turns out that it's difficult to get a good picture of a gloss black vehicle in a darkened museum gallery, lit only by spotlights, but I did my best to capture it to honor the time we spent gazing at it and watching the video describing it on the nearby screen.

The only thing missing from the museum was the sound of the engines. Every time I walked up to a car I tried to imagine what it would sound like, starting at idle, then revving in neutral, then accelerating away. Each car would sound different, based on the size and configuration of the engine and the exhaust. (I did not miss the tangy stench of exhaust, but many of the cars did have oil pans and I could smell faintly the delicate aroma of mineral oil coating the mechanical parts.)

The last thing we saw on our way out in the lobby (after the gift shop, where I told both kids that if they wanted to buy anything they would have to carry it all the way home in their backpacks, because that was the only available luggage space; Julian got a toy model of the 1981 DeLorean time machine we saw upstairs) was a 2023 Tesla Cybertruck release candidate, which was apparently the very same vehicle that Tesla had shot with small-caliber weapons in a video. (Calvin pointed out that they had very carefully avoided shooting at the windows.) They did not have the Cybertruck that one guy shot with a .50 caliber rifle, effortlessly punching straight through the thin door plate. (On social media, someone pointed out that if a few millimeters of steel could stop a rifle bullet, World War II would have been fought in plate armor.)

We left the museum and headed to our hotel in Hollywood (which had valet parking and no EV charging), then walked into Hollywood to eat burgers for supper. We walked up Vine towards Hollywood Boulevard, hitting the edge of the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I tried to read all of the stars we walked over, and most of them I didn't recognize, except for Sir Alec Guinness (and also a movie star turned president). My kids thought this was boring so we returned to the hotel to retire for the night.

For more pictures at the Petersen Automotive Museum, see Photos on 2024-04-04.