Travel
At the Foot of Hollywood
Nearly four million people populate the City of Angels, almost forty million in the greater Los Angeles area. Over the last several days, I drove through and around, above and below so many parts of the city, interacting with so…
Daunted by Homelessness
Fifty-three years ago this month, Robert Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles. Over time, the hotel was torn down and replaced by a school and a park to remember Kennedy and his soaring, hopeful rhetoric.…
Those Rowdy Pacific Waves
I’m not always good at catching the sunrise, mostly because I stay up too late reading or writing or spending time in whatever happens to occupy my mind aside from relaxing. The best sunrise I ever caught was last year…
Obama’s Years in LA
Nestled in the sprawling hills of Los Angeles is a lesser known fact of presidential history, that Mr. Obama once attended Occidental College—Oxy to everyone around here—from 1979 through 1981, before he transferred to Columbia. This is also one of…
Nixon Presidential Library
Visiting the Nixon Library, it’s hard not to wrestle with history, to groan a little bit when the place designed to honor a dishonored man gives him an occasional pass, a slight of word, here and there, to suggest he…
Trump Property in Beverly Hills
As anyone might imagine with Mr. Trump, whether he had become president or not, the reach of his property is vast, both in the United States and abroad. Melissa and I spent eight years living in Palm Beach Gardens and…
A Regular Type Life
Pacino once asked DeNiro to buy him a cup of coffee in 1995, one of the single greatest, most captivating scenes in movie history. It also happens to be my single favorite movie of all time. Hyperbole doesn’t feel the…
Boarding Air Force One
When you visit the Reagan Presidential Library, the penultimate exhibit, something that dwarfs every other exhibit at every other presidential library I’ve seen thus far, is Air Force One, packed in next to Marine One in the Simi Valley, near…
First Stop: A Gipper Couch Nap
After a sleepless night, a sleepless five hour flight, and an hour drive through LA traffic to reach the Reagan Presidential Library, I was barely conscious, which didn’t bode well for having traveled to a place that I really wanted…
Mountaintop Wedding
On our last night in Lake Tahoe, Melissa and I went for a couple of short hikes, one along a tributary of rapids that flow into the lake, and one to the top of Eagle Rock, which was apparently also…
