South Pacific 2010

We have two completely separate friends who had promised us that they were capable of providing 1) a place to stay on our first night out, and 2) a place to park the car for the month that we would be out of the country.  So, confident of our place in history, we drove down to Los Angeles and had a California French bistro meal that couldn’t be beat, and drove off with a blood alcohol likely in excess of .08%, to discover that neither person could be reached, or had landlords who had any intention of honoring their intentions.

Eleven PM in Los Angeles on Fourth of July Weekend.  Not good.

I think it will be OK.  We have found the Ocean Park Hotel on Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica — and how?  Tripadvisor, Yelp, Expedia?  No.  They are all way too slow.  We drove past it.  I am amazed that that approach still works.  Mind you, I am still dedicated to the idea of planning every aspect of a vacation before leaving the house because even with plans, you still end up with a fair amount of improv, but — at least serendipity can sort of work. Dave is on the Internet on his phone looking for a place to park the car tomorrow before we get on the airplane to Tahiti.

This meal we had featured no ordinary alcohol.  Our long standing friend Paul is a wine importer from France, and when we show up at his doorstep, as we did at 6:30 PM after a slightly convoluted drive from Woodside to Los Angeles (we had to stop at CostCo to pick up some photos for a friend in Romania to give to her neighbors, and also buy a small gift for a lad we met in Fiji in 2005 who has invited us to his father’s house for a kava ceremony), he habitually takes us to some stunningly trendy Los Angeles restaurant to which he deals French wine.  Tonight we went to Church and State, in an ever-less-sketchy neighborhood (factories becoming lofts) east of downtown. The stunningly beautiful and talented people who work there invariably shower our table with amuses-bouche and charcuterie compliments of the chef and it really stretches out the $300 to have a plank of salami slices from various named villages and the chopped livers of various family pets, with awesome mustard.

Paul brings his own wine, usually.  Tonight’s was from Languedoc.  The lecture that went with it was that it really doesn’t matter how much Grenache a wine might have in it, what is crucial is where it came from.

He also sent it back to be chilled because it’s too warm.

After the check came I wrote a snide note to my friend Byron about how much better a time we were having than he is (he is flying to Nicaragua tonight at 2 AM and maybe ate at Burger King) and launched into an hour and a half of annoyed panic coupled with hating everyone who made promises to me that they couldn’t keep.