A lot of you know I'm a map girl; I've always hated GPS. I like to see the whole picture at once. Have you ever had one of those really frustrating moments when you're lost, and your GPS gets stuck rerouting you, and you're just left to wait and wonder if you're making the wrong move? WHERE AM I GOING? This is especially awful in notorious LA traffic.
"Recalculating." "Finding your location." "Make a U-turn."
Well, we had a moment like that, and it was the night we arrived in California. Our plane landed in Las Vegas after a surprisingly easy and enjoyable (but long) flight, and about 5 hours later we pulled into a perfect palm-tree sunset in Los Angeles. We had booked a room in a house in South LA, which we knew can be a little unreliable but, as is the nature of leaving your comfortable home and career to chase a dream, our hearts were full of hope. When we arrived, the house looked as promised but was locked up behind a wall and gate. It needed to be guarded for a reason; outside there was trash on the streets, old furniture laying around, roaming stray animals (and roaming stray people), and barbed wire fencing around every building.
After hours of songs and games and the same two toys (the only ones that fit in the diaper bag), I looked at a smiling, loopy baby sitting next to me and said, "Sorry, buddy." While I've lived in worse areas during other travels, we agreed that we needed somewhere we felt more at home for the things we were to accomplish this trip. We drove away on the phone with AirBnB, our booking site, and stayed at a hotel near the casino where Mike works. For the next three days, we stayed displaced in Bell Gardens, trying to get our desperately-needed money back and wondering where to even begin looking next. For those of you unfamiliar with LA geography, South LA can be shady. Really shady. But I assumed there were pockets of nice neighborhoods like in any big city (and there might be, this just wasn't one). The location was great for someone needing to spend equal time in Hollywood and in the Southeast, and now we weren't sure where to go. Home, maybe? Was it more than just the wrong side of town - were we on the wrong map entirely? Was it a sign that we were pretty naive to try to make a life here?
(Boring travel lesson for my future self: never pick a place that doesn't have many reviews from other renters. If you feel like you want to be a martyr and give someone the benefit of the doubt for being a new landlord and not having many previous tenants, just don't. Read the reviews, research the neighborhood, don't trust a booking website just because it's reputable.)
Enter Rita Skeeta (our loving nickname), a 73-year-old woman from London who migrated to LA via New York and ended up being a hairdresser for the stars (really. Barbara Streisand and Drew Barrymore to name a few). She's also very good friends with McSteamy (Mark Sloan, Grey's Anatomy. No, he has not come around yet. Yes, I ask every day).
I came across another posting on AirBnB and the owner emailed me back saying he felt his friend Rita's place might be better for a young family like us. After secretly finding out how to call her (you're not allowed to exchange numbers before booking), we drove to Hollywood. Rita's house filled our lungs with fresh, positive, home-cooked air. I'll talk more about her story later, but picture her this way: precocious, sarcastic, enchanting, confident, and relentlessly enthusiastic. After she sat on the phone with AirBnB for an hour on our behalf, and she took us down to the corner for coffee, we decided to stay for a few days to regroup. With her help, we got a full refund for our previous booking, left the (fairly expensive) hotel that was already making me restless, and gave us back our confidence in this big chance we're taking.
While at Rita's, near the corner of the posh Melrose and LaBrea avenues, we cooked many meals together, watched the Academies, sat by the pool, drank a lot of tea, ate way too many croissants, and frequented new parts of town. After a few days, we moved out into our Koreatown compound, but we've continued to try to bless Rita's days in gratitude for all she gave us.
Ironically, when we went back to the first house we booked, the graffiti was being painted over and the streets were being cleaned. We chuckled, and decided it was divine intervention. Who knows why, but there was a reason to reroute. Some traffic later on that we just couldn't see yet.
See, this blog is about traveling, both in body and in spirit. And sometimes with travel, you have to make big adjustments in your route and in your destination. In a very important hour of our very important adventure, we met someone to help us mark up our map, fill our bellies and push us on our way.This time, with patience while the GPS recalculates, trusting that the destination is good, even if we don't know where that is yet.
(Blurry, taken by Rita's friend, but the only one we have so far!)
(Otto is learning to be a good citizen of the backseat. Learning...)
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