Los Angeles

Bucket List

~ MaryG ~ 8 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What countries do you want to visit?
View all responses

Speaking of buckets…way to go Boston Celtics! 🏀☘️ NBA championship #18.

This morning’s Boston Globe

I started a Bucket List (I’ve heard some say “Life List”) in the notepad app on my phone a couple years ago. I update it whenever the mood strikes. Sometimes a TV show, movie or book will shake up the order. For example, I read a book called “Independent People” by Haldór Laxness (a Nobel prize winner in literature) which resulted in Iceland getting booted from my list.

Here’s the latest version:
Grand Canyon ✅
Paris ✅
Finger Lakes & Hot Air Balloon ✅
Tanglewood
Yellowstone National Park
Ireland
NYC comedy club or SNL
Southern Italy (Naples; Amalfi Coast; Cinque Terra) and maybe Sicily
Sweden
Return to Paris in warmer weather and see the sites we missed
Argentina?
Return to SoCal – LA/San Diego; Santa Monica; Venice Beach; Yosemite; Joshua Tree?
Key West
Austin TX
Greece
Acadia National Park

An image from my last trip to LA (you know, the city that’s won 17 NBA championships)
The year was 1988 and George H.W. Bush was on the ballot.

My friend Julie (the eventual artist) made sure we visited the Watts Towers in South Los Angeles.

The famous Watts Towers in LA—a renegade 33-year folk art project by Italian immigrant construction worker and tile mason Simon “Sam” Rodia
Apparently some part of it was closed that day, but we got the idea. It’s very cool—a labor of love.

Watts Towers State Park

Leaving on a jet plane

~ MaryG ~ 11 Comments
Daily writing prompt
You’re going on a cross-country trip. Airplane, train, bus, car, or bike?
View all responses

If we’re talking about my country (the U.S), I’m going on an airplane. The days when I may have fantasized about doing a Jack Kerouac/Hunter S. Thompson/Bob Dylan/Route 66 Great American Road Trip are over. It always sounded cool and like something you should do at least once in your life, but I never did it. I once drove from Massachusetts to Florida with a boyfriend. We had no particular plan. It was spring break and we just wanted to get warm, so we headed south. I think we made it to Daytona Beach before heading back.

Driving all the way to California from Massachusetts would’ve been a great adventure in my twenties, but I won’t be adding it to my bucket list now. I’m too old for that shit. And a bus would be even worse.

Actually, my mother took a bus from Massachusetts to California with two of her friends (one from high school and one from college) in 1960, between her junior and senior year of college. This was before women could get birth control or hold a credit card in their own name. They got jobs in Los Angeles and stayed for the whole summer, then took the bus back. They just wanted to see the country and have an adventure. I’ve always been impressed that my grandmother allowed her to plan that trip and that she had the guts to go.

Los Angeles in 1959 (photo by Railroad Jack on Flickr)
My mother in the 1950s

I suppose you could take a train across the United States, but nobody I know has done that, so perhaps it’s not that great of an experience.

Six years after my mother’s adventure, I was born. Two years after that, Peter, Paul and Mary wrote Leaving on a Jet Plane. I always loved that song.