But to confuse the order a bit more, I'm going to explain some of the key characters on this trip. First and foremost is my aunt Margaret. She's my dad's youngest sister, and she's lived in Los Angeles for as long as I've been alive. She lived with her mother for most of those years, and she was very close with her until her death a couple of years ago. She has always wanted family to come visit her, but I'm the only one who's actually come.
Margaret is actually very connected in the entertainment industry. She got us free passes to Universal Studios ($70 usually), got us VIP passes on the Warner Bros. lot through a connection with the president of the studio, and she knows a bunch of celebrities. Over the course of the trip, she mentioned encounters with Tom Hanks, George Clooney, Jim Carrey, and a bunch of others.
And one of her connections was with the LA Dodgers. I've been to Dodger Stadium before, and it's a pretty cool place. A lot of Dodger history is in Brooklyn, but they have a lot of memories in Los Angeles as well. And I've always had a bit of a soft spot for the Dodgers, and I knew it'd be fun to go.
My aunt got us tickets behind home plate on the third deck - which is coincidentally the same place where my friends and I usually sit at Rangers' games. In fact, I sat in that same place at a Rangers' game tonight.
So we arrived at the stadium early to see some warm-ups and get situated. The stadium is positioned in a great place. Walking up to the stadium, you have a great view of the LA skyline. Inside the stadium, you have a great view of the mountains - including a nice "Think Blue" spelled like the Hollywood sign on one of the mountains.
After the first inning, we went up the press box. Margaret knows one of the producers of the radio show, and we were led into the Dodgers' booth. Vin Scully, the famous voice of the Dodgers, does the radio and TV broadcast for the first three innings before moving exclusively to TV for the final innings. So the radio crew, which includes Charlie Steiner, doesn't have much to do for the first three innings.
And it was cool to hang out with this guy who has a job that I'd love to have. He gets to travel with the team everywhere he goes, he hangs out with Vin Scully and Charlie Steiner, and he gets to watch baseball for a living. It's just a cool job.
The game itself was pretty conventional. It was interesting that the starting pitcher for Los Angeles was Vicente Padilla. Padilla, the former Ranger pitcher, was the guy who I always saw when I went to Rangers' games, and I guess that followed me to LA now that he's a Dodger.
And that was Tuesday. Wednesday was my free day...which leads me into two new characters - Diosa and Alisa.
When I first started at JPMorgan, one of the big clients that I got was PIMCO - the Pacific Investment Company. My contact there was Alisa, who had a reputation of being a bit of a hardass. When I met her, I couldn't disagree with those thoughts. Alisa liked to get the job done correctly and simply didn't give an inch to anyone who made that harder for her. She did her job well and efficiently, and she expected the same from everyone she worked with. I respected that, and I loved talked to her.
She's young, she's fun, and she's cool. Of all my clients, she was the only one who's work phone I bothered to memorize. And we talked every workday, for the most part, developing a bit of a friendship in addition to our work relationship.
One day, Diosa appeared on the scene as someone who helped Alisa. I liked working with Alisa, so I didn't call Diosa (Jo-sa) very often at first. Eventually, though, Diosa won me over. She was my age, and she loved LOST. That was enough for me.
Oh...and these girls are both really cute, by the way. Taken...but cute.
So when I found out I was coming to Los Angeles, one of the first things I did was email the two of them. "I'm coming - please clear a night for me!" They agreed that Wednesday would work the best for them, and I told my aunt to leave that day open for me. She did, and we agreed to make that a beach day in the morning and leave the night to my PIMCO friends.
But there was a problem - Diosa and Alisa worked across town from my aunt. I was going to need a car to get to them because I wasn't going to make them drive all the way out to me.
So I rented a car - a nice Nissan Versa - in the morning and that's how Margaret and I traveled to the beach. But there was another problem - LA was having unseasonably cold and cloudy weather - not exactly great beach weather. But I had to see the water - so I didn't care. We took the rental car to Malibu and drove down the Pacific Coast Highway.
It's always fun for me to see the water. I don't know what it is about the ocean, but I love seeing it. I've been asked why I don't live closer to it, and I argue that it'd lose a lot of its magic if I saw it every day. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
So we stopped on a nice little beach, and I went in the water for a couple of minutes. The air and the ocean were both 60 degrees, so it was pretty cold. But it's always nice to sink into the sand as the waves roll in. It wasn't perfect weather, but it was still worth being out there and watching an endless landscape of water.
We also stopped at a little shop where we hoped to see someone famous. It's a little chic Malibu market where celebrities are said to have gone. We didn't see anyone, but I did buy an expensive cherry Coke. So I guess that was worth it.
After that, we headed back. My aunt needed to go into work, and I was going to be headed to Huntington Beach for a happy hour with Diosa, Alisa, and Alisa's fiance Chris. I got a navigation system for the Versa so that I could make the one-hour trip all the way across LA, and I sure needed it. I left Pasadena about 2:50, and I arrived just after 4pm. I coordinated with Diosa and Alisa, and we were going to meet at Cheesecake Factory. They both were off work, and we met.
And that's when a bit of panic set in. Here I was in Huntington Beach, a town I've never been to, and I looked down at my phone. Low battery. The battery light was flashing, and the screen refused to illuminate fully. My friends hadn't found me, and my phone was about to die.
So I rushed inside the restaurant and wrote down Margaret's number. At the very least, I needed to know how to call her if things went wrong. I told the girls where I was going to be, and I shut my phone off. Diosa found me, and we hung out for a little bit. I checked my phone...and luckily, it re-activated with a couple of bars. So I was saved for a bit in case of emergency.
Eventually, Alisa and Chris showed up, and we had a good time. It was really weird to meet the girls in person - I'd only every communicated with them on the phone and on email. I knew what they looked like from facebook, but you never know what to expect when you run into someone for real.
But they were everything I expected them to be. We had a great time at happy hour, and eventually moved over to a family-style Italian restaurant for dinner. It was one of Chris' friend's birthdays, and we were all invited. And these people were all in their 30s, but they were a lot of fun. We laughed and told stories, and they were all curious about my life as a Texan. It was really cool.
And before I knew it, the night was over. I said goodnight to the girls and told them they needed to visit me in Texas. I think they might actually come next year - which is nice because none of them had ever been.
As I made my way across LA in the dark, I was really happy. Meeting these people was one of the reasons I was most excited about the trip, and my expectations had been met. With no offense to my aunt, it was fun to hang out with people my own age, and I was happy that things had gone so well.
And while I'd passed the halfway point of the trip, I still had a lot left. And more on that next time.
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