My Trip to Los Angeles

December 10 - 15, 2008

A couple of weeks before Christmas I was finally able to make a trip down to Los Angeles to visit Aunt Mitzi and Uncle Stan Eisenberg and see/meet my cousins. I had a wonderful time. The highlights of my trip were:

• Spending time with Stan and Mitzi
• Seeing three of my cousins for the first time in over 40 years
• We went to dinner with Lauren, her husband Howard, daughter Jillian and Bruce's daughter Beylah
• We had dinner at Gary's home with his wife Edelia, children Jason and Jennifer. Also there were Jason's girlfriend and Edelia's niece, Estella and her husband, Angel who cooked a gourmet meal for us.
• We had dinner at Sheri's home with her husband David and children Samantha, Hannah and Brendan.
• Sight-seeing in Santa Monica, Brentwood and Malibu
• Meeting Lola

Below are a few of the pictures from my visit. The "people" pictures are on my Facebook account.

Apparently this is THE stroller you have to have if you live in Santa Monica. I think I saw 75 of these strollers...called "Uppababy" stroller.

This little shop is one block from Mitzi and Stan's place. We didn't go in, but I took a picture of it because of the name. Ponte Vecchio reminded me of Drew on his mission in Firenze.

That is Catalina Island in the center of the picture.


Malibu

These cute kids are from a very exclusive, expensive private French school. They were singing Christmas carols in French at the Studio City Mall. When I turned around I saw the scene below.


It was hard to get a good view of the singers with all the parents filming the whole thing.

A view from the mall.

Mitzi at the food court. She found this cute sweater at Banana Republic.

There were a couple of fake owls on the edge of the roof at the mall food court. I think they were supposed to keep the pidgeons away.

It didn't work.

This was the view as we went over the hill from the coast into the valley. It was beautiful that day. Hardly any smog.

This was Saturday afternoon. I wouldn't have expected to see this kind of traffic.


The route to Gary's house in Pasadena took us right past the exit to my grandparent's (former) home in North Hollywood. The house is about 3/4 of a mile from here.

This picture is for Kyle.

The flight home was wonderful. The only problem is that I left 50 degree sunny skies in California and arrived to 8 degree snow on the ground cloudy skies in Washington.