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| The Shoes |
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| Purses and Fans |
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| Pile of Costumes ( I took 8) |
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| Hats and Toppers and Tiara! |
I made a vow that I would not be sewing until the last minute, not pull any all nighters and be packed ahead and not scrambling at the last minute. Wonder of wonders, I was able to do it. I put in my last stitches a week before leaving and spent the last week cleaning up from neglected chores while working and packing.
We were ready on time and left the morning of July 25th and drove to Los Banos where we stopped for the night. It was a reasonably decent Best Western there with a Hot Tub that we needed by then. We ate dinner that night at Pea Soup Anderson's. All the years I have passed that placed when I lived in California and I never ate there. Well the soup was good and their salads huge and yummy, funky decor, loud obnoxious music. We discovered that this is now the norm in California, the idea of pleasant soft music you can converse over is obsolete apparently, everywhere we went there was loud, headache inducing music, that you had to shout over. I guess since most people there just sit at table and text message, it doesn't matter. Rude!
I think next time we will plan to stop at Harris ranch, it is only a little further, about another half hour and so much nicer, although more expensive. Since I was doing all the driving, I didn't want to try to make it all the way to the LA area in one day. The next day we started out early and drove on to LA, we had hoped to get there around 11:00am and have time to see the heritage square museum/park. But what should have been a 3.5-4 hour drive turned into a 9 hour one, as soon as we got over the Mountains, right where the freeway crosses over that heads to Pasadena, we were in stop and go all the way. As soon as I realized that we needed to skip the park, I got flustered, I couldn't find a way to get off the freeway and find the directions for the hotel and so I called them, the young woman who answered didn't know how to direct me so she gave me bad directions from looking it up wrong in the computer and we ended up going off on the 101 to
Ventura and by the time we made enough calls to get back on track we had gone a total of 120 miles out of our way. We finally made it to the hotel and checked in, threw our stuff in the room, rinsed off, and headed out to the park and ride for the Hollywood Bowl. When we got to the location for that, we couldn't see anything that looked like what we wanted. We ended up calling our hotel, who called a near by restaurant and between the two we got parked and on the bus, where a lovely local young woman took us under her wing and made sure we didn't get lost again the rest of the night.
Gloria Estevan was amazing. The concert was fantastic and I couldn't believe how huge the place was, I really felt country bumpkin! I thought there would be a few fireworks, and they had one of the best displays I've ever seen, the setting is fabulous and our seats were great. I bought the CD during intermission and I recommend it, "The Standards." She sings some of the oldies but goodies! Mom had a good time too since there were songs she liked as well as some of Gloria's big hits. More trip saga and costume goodness to follow dear ones, so stay tuned!
