Road Trip Day 2

We had stayed at the Marriot near the Burbank airport, which was pretty cheap off Priceline. We planned to see Santa Monica, which meant a bit of a drive, but fortunately, the traffic wasn't too bad.

We spend the late morning on the 3rd St. Promenade, where a farmer's market was running. While it was pointless to get groceries, we did get some interesting pastries (marmalade/onion, pesto/goat cheese/mint), and some incredibly delicious "flavor grenade pluots".

Time was spent on Santa Monica beach, which wasn't actually all that busy earlier in the day. We also rented a tandem bike for an easy ride down to Venice beach. The whole Santa Monica area feels clean and yuppie, while the hippies hang out at Venice beach. Cast of characters included a homeless looking Santa (in August), and a tanned dude that looked like Conan the Barbarian. There was less weed in the air than I'd expected, but maybe that's just after living in SF for so long.

After a few hours on the beach, we drove over to Beverly Hills for a stroll. Window shopping at Rodeo/Wilshire resulted in buying a cupcake at Crumbs, which we noted was at least 50c more than a cupcake at Kara's (though, somewhat bigger as well).

For dinner we drove over to Monterey Park. I hadn't been in the area since the early 2000s, but it didn't really look like too much had changed. We stopped at Savoy Kitchen for the much praised Hainan chicken rice, which was quite good, as well as the beef brisket curry, which was quite outstanding.

I napped a bit in the car after dinner to kill some time, and headed over to Pomona for teh Body Language show there. I probably should have showed up earlier this time, since they were playing last and there were some other bands playing before them. Pomona was a surprisingly hip town. Just stepping out of the car in the parking lot, I could hear at least two different live bands playing. Walking around showed even more tiny venues with live music. Most of the crowd looked college aged, but there were a few older folks around. It wasn't a crazy party environment, but definitely fun on a Friday night.

Unfortunately, I had already booked a hotel further down on our route, and we moved on for Barstow before the night got late.