Hollywood Forever
Started: 2024-04-15 20:42:14
Submitted: 2024-04-16 22:33:01
Visibility: World-readable
Wrapping up two days in Los Angeles
On our last day in Hollywood our flight left LAX at 12:30, which left a kind-of-awkward amount of time in the morning in which we couldn't really do anything. Neither of the kids wanted to head out to see Hollywood Forever Cemetery, a few blocks away down Santa Monica Boulevard, so I nipped out on my own. The clouds (and occasional rain) of the previous day had cleared, leaving a bright blue sky.
I walked down the main road leading into the cemetery without a specific destination in mind. The road was lined with a mixture of raised monuments and flat tombs, many with Jewish symbols. Further in the cemetery many of the tombs bore the Russian Orthodox cross. Towards the end of the grounds the white walls of the stages on the Paramount lot loomed, an interesting contrast to the quiet greenery of the cemetery.
Looking back I could see the Hollywood Sign framed by the palm trees at the entrance.
My map led me to a monument to Toto the dog, from The Wizard of Oz. This part of the cemetery had more custom monuments, some with names I thought I should recognize, some with statues, including Johnny Ramone; his monument included a quote from Rob Zombie, which seemed like an interesting way to be remembered.
I walked through an above-ground mausoleum with small niches that looked like the right size for cremated remains. I heard a cackling shriek and looked up to see a peacock standing on top of the mausoleum, one of several peacocks I saw roaming the grounds. I looped back towards the entrance, making a large circuit through the cemetery. I saw Cecil B. DeMille's tomb, and a cat resting on a gravestone. (In the movie version this would be the cat paying respect to its former human; but the human had been buried for more than 40 years so the best case is that the cat is paying respects to their great-grandparents' human.)
I left the cemetery and headed back to the hotel to gather the kids and head to the airport. I abandoned any pretense of charging my car before returning it, because EV charging infrastructure is still poorly developed, despite rental car companies filling their fleets with hard-to-charge EVs. (Driving an electric car through the streets of Los Angeles felt like I was experiencing the future, except for the part where the charging infrastructure was still poorly-developed. It was the "unevenly distributed" part of the future.)
I dropped off the rental car the guy checking in cars waved me on to the shuttle before he got all the way to my car. (This proved somewhat troublesome; several days later Avis sent me an email asking when I was going to return the car. I responded that I had in fact already returned the car, though I didn't have any robust proof that I had done so. A couple of days later they sent me a receipt which I'm hoping indicates they actually did find the car, on their lot. They did charge me $18 for "fuel", which I hope means they charged the car above the 28% that they gave it to me.)
On the shuttle to the terminal I got a good view of the concrete viaduct built for the still-under-construction people-mover at LAX, which will run in a straight line from the international terminal to a brand-new consolidated rental car facility on the outskirts of the airport. The whole system might open late next year, so maybe I'll get to use it the next time I come to Los Angeles. In lieu of the people mover, I had to wait in the rental car shuttle as it crawled around World Way to get to terminal 6 for my Alaska Airlines flight back to San Jose.
We ate an early lunch in the airport (at California Pizza Kitchen, which turns out to be the only kind of melted cheese that Julian will eat), then flew back to San Jose on our way home to Santa Cruz, after 48 hours on the ground in Los Angeles.
