The Middle of California
After blasting out of Joshua Tree on Saturday, I drove straight for the Hollywood Hills, new home of the lovely Cara Maggioni. She moved out of the flatlands of West Hollywood a few months ago and now has a fabulous house off Mulholland on a very windy, overgrown street that she shares with some movie stars (don't remember their names but saw their huge compounds). She's so high up in the hills that it's cool up there. She has a big back yard with a BBQ pit, a lemon tree, a bottle brush tree, an herb garden, a giant mimosa tree, and ground covering green stuff everywhere. I stepped out of the car straight from the desert and it
was just like John Steinbeck says, the land of milk and honey. Cara met me with a bottle of wine (a good friend indeed) and we hit the back yard errace under the mimosa tree and stayed there for several hours.
After the sun set and moon rose, Cara's sister showed up and drove us straight down the ountain to an Italian place at the bottom of Laurel Canyon Drive that is built into the Hills. The back of the restaurant is underground. On top of the restaurant is an old timey general store
where you can buy gob smackers for a dime and pop rocks for 20 cents. We bought both. Cara's sister is a TV producer and her conversation actually works into normal conversation phrases like "Debra Messig isn't allowed to work on any of our projects because she wants too much free stuff" and "Jennifer Aniston isn't invited to my Christmas party this year because fired my ex-husband off a project because she didn't like the way the script ended." Somehow this doesn't sound pretentious coming from Cara's sister. The Italian place was also overgrown and
shady, foliage everywhere. We sat at an outdoor table surrounded by bougainvillea. We could barely see the moon through the flowers. The night sky was as it always is in Southern California, very dark blue instead of black. We could have been anywhere in the Mediterranean
rather than in Los Angeles. The air smelled like eucalyptus and jacaranda.
After our lengthy dinner we drove straight back up the Canyon again to Cara's house in the hill, where we all fell into bed like toy soldiers. The next morning Cara's sister showed up once again and we drove down the other side of the mountains to Studio City, where we had breakfast in a Jewish deli that offered knishes and matzo ball soup and eggs benedict with lox, etc. One half of the menu was in Yiddish. I briefly learned the Yiddish word for "aquacade" but I've already forgotten it. Cara's boyfriend was with us by now and he's a talent agent. He and Cara's sister spent most of the breakfast analyzing the financials they had gotten by Blackberry of the new Star Wars movie's weekly earnings. This is serious business in Hollywood. To pass the time while they analyzed the Star Wars financials, Cara and I analyzed our favorite
foods (very long list).
After breakfast, I hit the road north to Carmel. The drive took me through what John Steinbeck called "America's Salad Bowl," the Central Valley that stretches north from Bakersfield to Salinas. I went through the windy and treacherous mountain pass at Grapevine -- six miles down hill on a curvy Interstate at 6 percent grade -- which plants you right on the huge flat plain with mountain ranges running north to south on either side of you. I went through the rose farms in Wasco. Roses nodding for miles, each row a different color. I went through almond groves and pistachio groves and lettuce fields and artichoke patches and fields and fields of cattle pasture. I passed railroad sidings that lead to potato packing plants. North of Bakersfield, about three hours into the trip, I turned west towards Paso Robles. Some of you will recall that I once spent an evening in a vineyard in Paso Robles listening to an Israeli jazz violinist play to a crowd seated on the grass. I was next to an avocado farmer who was enraged at the FDA because it wouldn't let him sell what he thought was a superior avocado but which others felt infected the rest of the national avocado supply with parasites. He gave me one of his avocados. It was tasty.
The drive from Wasco to Paso Robles took me across the Antelope Valley and through the Antelope Mountains. These are soft hills the color of buckskin. Yellow hills with dark green live oaks and tall grass waving. From Wasco to Paso Robles is a good two hours on a perfectly straight road that makes exactly one turn to cross the San Andreas fault on the way through the Antelope Mountains pass. At Paso Robles, traffic was diverted to avoid a brush fire. The fire crews were out creating back fires and dousing homes with retardant. We crawled through the smoke with windows rolled up and the air conditioning off. North of Paso Robles, I passed oil fields and Pinnacles National Monument and horse farms and fig trees. By this time I had been on the road for over 5 hours and the sun was starting to set and I was getting a little drousy.
The road was perfectly straight, as it had been ever since Grapevine, four hours ago. I wanted to get to ocean at Carmel and out of the hot valley. So predictably, outside of Salinas, no more than 10 miles from the turn off for the Monterey Peninsula, the Kia Amante and I get pulled
over for speeding. Which I wouldn't mind so much except in California you can't just pay a fine and go on your way; you have to actually go to court to find out what your fine is. So now I have to deal with an elaborate out of state procedure that requires me calling some judge and
offering to pay huge amounts of money instead of ....what? I'm not even sure what the options are. Grr. The highway patrol guy was nice though, about 12 years old and blond and very tan and sort of shocked that the Kia Amante didn't belong to me and that I didn't live in
Salinas. I began to wonder if he hadn't pulled me over for reasons other than wanting to give me a ticket.
40 minutes after getting the ticket, I pulled into the Park Hyatt Highlands Inn in Carmel. I know I keep telling everyone that L'Auberge Del Mar is the perfect hotel, but actually, the Highlands Inn is even nicer. My room was made out of redwood and jutted out over the Monterey Cypress trees over the rocks and the waves on an isolated part of Route 1 between Carmel and Big Sur. I had a fireplace and the fire was burning when I arrived. The chairs on the porch were facing the sunset over the Pacific. To get to my room you had to walk down six or seven flights of stairs through a garden full of Monterey pines and cypresses and jasmine and fir trees and moss. My room smelled of seashells and pine cones. The linens were absolutely white and crisp. The only sound was the waves and the wind. After the eccentric scuzziness of the Riviera in Palm Springs, I was in heaven. The poor tan California bell boy who had to carry my overweight suitcase down all the flights of stairs through the cypress woods saw my face when I entered the room and said, "you know, you can just stay in here and order room service. Everything will come to you."
So that's what I did. I had a fabulous night alone in luxury with the ocean and the wind and the cypress trees and my white white linens and the dark blue (not black) sky and the stars. The only thing that disturbed me was the moon shining through my french doors from over the
ocean. It was so bright it woke me up.
After blasting out of Joshua Tree on Saturday, I drove straight for the Hollywood Hills, new home of the lovely Cara Maggioni. She moved out of the flatlands of West Hollywood a few months ago and now has a fabulous house off Mulholland on a very windy, overgrown street that she shares with some movie stars (don't remember their names but saw their huge compounds). She's so high up in the hills that it's cool up there. She has a big back yard with a BBQ pit, a lemon tree, a bottle brush tree, an herb garden, a giant mimosa tree, and ground covering green stuff everywhere. I stepped out of the car straight from the desert and it
was just like John Steinbeck says, the land of milk and honey. Cara met me with a bottle of wine (a good friend indeed) and we hit the back yard errace under the mimosa tree and stayed there for several hours.
After the sun set and moon rose, Cara's sister showed up and drove us straight down the ountain to an Italian place at the bottom of Laurel Canyon Drive that is built into the Hills. The back of the restaurant is underground. On top of the restaurant is an old timey general store
where you can buy gob smackers for a dime and pop rocks for 20 cents. We bought both. Cara's sister is a TV producer and her conversation actually works into normal conversation phrases like "Debra Messig isn't allowed to work on any of our projects because she wants too much free stuff" and "Jennifer Aniston isn't invited to my Christmas party this year because fired my ex-husband off a project because she didn't like the way the script ended." Somehow this doesn't sound pretentious coming from Cara's sister. The Italian place was also overgrown and
shady, foliage everywhere. We sat at an outdoor table surrounded by bougainvillea. We could barely see the moon through the flowers. The night sky was as it always is in Southern California, very dark blue instead of black. We could have been anywhere in the Mediterranean
rather than in Los Angeles. The air smelled like eucalyptus and jacaranda.
After our lengthy dinner we drove straight back up the Canyon again to Cara's house in the hill, where we all fell into bed like toy soldiers. The next morning Cara's sister showed up once again and we drove down the other side of the mountains to Studio City, where we had breakfast in a Jewish deli that offered knishes and matzo ball soup and eggs benedict with lox, etc. One half of the menu was in Yiddish. I briefly learned the Yiddish word for "aquacade" but I've already forgotten it. Cara's boyfriend was with us by now and he's a talent agent. He and Cara's sister spent most of the breakfast analyzing the financials they had gotten by Blackberry of the new Star Wars movie's weekly earnings. This is serious business in Hollywood. To pass the time while they analyzed the Star Wars financials, Cara and I analyzed our favorite
foods (very long list).
After breakfast, I hit the road north to Carmel. The drive took me through what John Steinbeck called "America's Salad Bowl," the Central Valley that stretches north from Bakersfield to Salinas. I went through the windy and treacherous mountain pass at Grapevine -- six miles down hill on a curvy Interstate at 6 percent grade -- which plants you right on the huge flat plain with mountain ranges running north to south on either side of you. I went through the rose farms in Wasco. Roses nodding for miles, each row a different color. I went through almond groves and pistachio groves and lettuce fields and artichoke patches and fields and fields of cattle pasture. I passed railroad sidings that lead to potato packing plants. North of Bakersfield, about three hours into the trip, I turned west towards Paso Robles. Some of you will recall that I once spent an evening in a vineyard in Paso Robles listening to an Israeli jazz violinist play to a crowd seated on the grass. I was next to an avocado farmer who was enraged at the FDA because it wouldn't let him sell what he thought was a superior avocado but which others felt infected the rest of the national avocado supply with parasites. He gave me one of his avocados. It was tasty.
The drive from Wasco to Paso Robles took me across the Antelope Valley and through the Antelope Mountains. These are soft hills the color of buckskin. Yellow hills with dark green live oaks and tall grass waving. From Wasco to Paso Robles is a good two hours on a perfectly straight road that makes exactly one turn to cross the San Andreas fault on the way through the Antelope Mountains pass. At Paso Robles, traffic was diverted to avoid a brush fire. The fire crews were out creating back fires and dousing homes with retardant. We crawled through the smoke with windows rolled up and the air conditioning off. North of Paso Robles, I passed oil fields and Pinnacles National Monument and horse farms and fig trees. By this time I had been on the road for over 5 hours and the sun was starting to set and I was getting a little drousy.
The road was perfectly straight, as it had been ever since Grapevine, four hours ago. I wanted to get to ocean at Carmel and out of the hot valley. So predictably, outside of Salinas, no more than 10 miles from the turn off for the Monterey Peninsula, the Kia Amante and I get pulled
over for speeding. Which I wouldn't mind so much except in California you can't just pay a fine and go on your way; you have to actually go to court to find out what your fine is. So now I have to deal with an elaborate out of state procedure that requires me calling some judge and
offering to pay huge amounts of money instead of ....what? I'm not even sure what the options are. Grr. The highway patrol guy was nice though, about 12 years old and blond and very tan and sort of shocked that the Kia Amante didn't belong to me and that I didn't live in
Salinas. I began to wonder if he hadn't pulled me over for reasons other than wanting to give me a ticket.
40 minutes after getting the ticket, I pulled into the Park Hyatt Highlands Inn in Carmel. I know I keep telling everyone that L'Auberge Del Mar is the perfect hotel, but actually, the Highlands Inn is even nicer. My room was made out of redwood and jutted out over the Monterey Cypress trees over the rocks and the waves on an isolated part of Route 1 between Carmel and Big Sur. I had a fireplace and the fire was burning when I arrived. The chairs on the porch were facing the sunset over the Pacific. To get to my room you had to walk down six or seven flights of stairs through a garden full of Monterey pines and cypresses and jasmine and fir trees and moss. My room smelled of seashells and pine cones. The linens were absolutely white and crisp. The only sound was the waves and the wind. After the eccentric scuzziness of the Riviera in Palm Springs, I was in heaven. The poor tan California bell boy who had to carry my overweight suitcase down all the flights of stairs through the cypress woods saw my face when I entered the room and said, "you know, you can just stay in here and order room service. Everything will come to you."
So that's what I did. I had a fabulous night alone in luxury with the ocean and the wind and the cypress trees and my white white linens and the dark blue (not black) sky and the stars. The only thing that disturbed me was the moon shining through my french doors from over the
ocean. It was so bright it woke me up.
posted by Anonymous @ 8:39 PM
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