La Brea Bike Adventure, Part 1: Bike Ride

The beginning of the bike-ride adventure had an odd impetus. I first found cool places to camp for free (a site in the Carrizo Plain), then found cool sights in Los Angeles to drive to, like the houses used in the television show "Modern Family" (Mitchel and Cam's place is in reality less than two miles from Claire and Phil's), then thought about some cool stuff we did as kids, like the tar pits, and stuff we never did as a kid, like Exposition Park.

Then I thought about abandoning the car idea, and moving the adventure to bikes. Both the La Brea Tar Pits and Expo Park would be accessible through a combination of bikes and subway rides.

Then we talked about Sidewalk Grilling and then hitting up the movie at the Long Beach Art Theater, the Art Deco theater on 4th, less than a mile away.

Once the latter half of the day was decided upon, we needed to choose between the pits and Expo Park. The pits just sounded cooler. That, and there was a USC home game on the same day, which would have crowded up the Expo Park sculpture hunt, since the Coliseum is also on the Expo Park grounds.

So that gave us one thing to go to on the subway to subway to bike. Blue line to Purple line to Wilshire and Western, the end of the line in Koreatown. I scribbled out a little map to take. Wilshire to Manhattan to 4th to Cochran to 6th to the Park. It was maybe three miles.

We didn't get over to 4th that fast, instead we went down 5th for a little while, and below is a shot of a palm-lined stretch of that street:

Now, if you can zoom in on that palm-lined street, on the left-hand side, down the way, there is barely visible  a trio of people. I noticed them as I went by, and later checked to see if they came up on the camera, which they do. There are two women and one guy; one women was posing for the guy who had a camera, doing a sexy/coy look at the camera while wearing tight clothes, while the other women was attending to some other production-assistant duties. It was an exterior shot of the girl and the house. Are there any fellas out there that know what that's all about?

Who guesses that we'd see a silver Vlad Lenin sculpture?

This post is mostly for pictures from the ride itself. Here's a street perpendicular to 4th, looking north, and the Hollywood sign is visible on the mountain.

We stopped in for a snack before getting back to the train. We were in Koreatown, and thought about getting just an appetizer and maybe an entree, splitting both. They brought a plate kim-chi (that I wolfed down, along with a second plate) and a plate of pickled radishes and onions with a soybean paste dipping sauce. It was ostensibly a Chinese restaurant, and we ordered pot-stickers (I had some in SF with Tony and Emily, and still had a hankering) as an appetizer. They brought out eight fried dumplings. Next was spicy vermicelli and pork, and the table was filled up pretty quick for our afternoon snack.

They even brought us a tiny cup of fro-yo for free as a dessert with the bill.