Day 19

This post is a part of a series on my three and a half week adventure road tripping to the west coast with three of my best friends in the Summer of 2018. I was challenged to write every day of the trip to document the adventure, so I did! My aim was to be as real and raw as possible while I was documenting and writing. Because of this, some days, I was honestly just not interested in writing, so I wrote very matter of fact “this is what we did.”

Check out the first part of the series here: Day 1 or check out a list of the days here: WCT2018

I wrote everything on my phone’s notes app, and below is word-for-word what I wrote each day. Nothing taken out, no elaborations.

As part of the challenge, I also made sure to take at least one picture every day, and each evening when I wrote, I picked one photo that I wanted to feature from that day. Some days it was hard to pick them, and other days I had only one to pick from.

A couple of notes: Each day that I wrote, I wrote the date, where I was writing from, and how many pictures I had taken that day. So the location doesn’t always reflect where the picture was taken.

August 9th
Lyon’s house - Thousand Oaks California
Pictures taken: 7

Today was our explore the city day. We started out really early at Griffith Observatory and saw the Hollywood sign and downtown L.A. as the sun rose. It was crazy being in the city so early! We left around 5:00 and when we got into the downtown area, there was hardly anyone on the streets! L.A. is definitely a nightlife city. We hung around there for awhile, and while we didn’t have it to ourselves, there were probably only 10 to 20 other people around it. So glad we did it in the morning.

After this we headed to the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Once again, I was incredibly underwhelmed. Most of L.A. just kind of seems run down. I always think of it as this nice place where entertainment is born. I know I’ve heard people talk about how they “make it look nicer than it really is,” but I just didn’t realize how much. I also realized how much a place is completely made by the people. Walking through L.A. if no one were there would be completely boring. The reason people think it’s cool is to think about these stars being here in person. That’s what excites you.

In the same way, people can completely detract from something. Unfortunately, the people around there really did. A lot of homeless and people on drugs on the street. I don’t want to be calloused to their situations, but it is a bummer to see a place where you can see what was class and beauty turned into the dump it is now.

While we were walking there was some commotion over a group that had put a bunch of Trump stars next to other stars, but other than that, we were there early enough to avoid a lot of people from shops on the side.

After the Walk of Fame, we went to a coffee shop for a bit, to a downtown bookstore, then drove through Beverly Hills to see some bigger houses. Unfortunately, a lot of the really big houses have fences and trees around them, so that was a little annoying. We were planning to go to the Getty Museum, but there were some weird feelings going on in the vehicle, so we decided to skip it and head home. I was pretty bummed about that, but I know it happened for a reason.

Tonight after we got back we went to a Young Adult event at a church with our new friend, Jedi Lyons. It was so interesting seeing a lot of people my age in the area. Just from seeing them you can see that you live very different lives. I’ve found though you share similarities with everyone the deep enough you go. You will always have differences, but you will also always have commonalities.