One of the disadvantages of working from home is that you are never far enough away from your work to not work. It’s always there, right in front of you.
So, after about a month of toiling every day, we decided to put the brakes on and break away from it all.
We can see the Hollywood sign and the Griffith Observatory from our living room window; but we had yet to visit either place.
So we decided to knock one of these off our bucket list and visit Griffith. It is a mere 20 minutes drive away and so we figured this was far enough from our “job site” and interesting enough to distract us from making mental lists of things we still need to do.
The road winds up to the plateau where the observatory is perched. Parking was no problem, despite myriad signs warning otherwise. As expected, since this was in the middle of the week, there was a swarm of school children. Apparently, this is an annual pilgrimage for fifth graders in the L.A. area. But, fortunately, they were just leaving as we arrived.
So we more or less had the place to ourselves, with a few other tourists.
In fact, since we arrived at noon and were hungry, we headed to the cafeteria first, which was serving some sandwiches, soups and salads apparently inspired by Wolfgang Puck. We grabbed a few prepackaged items and had no problem finding a table. The place was completely empty.
After lunch, we moseyed about the place, observing meteorites, displays of the planets and the stars and, perhaps one of my favorite tourist attractions in science-related museum: a Foucault Pendulum.
We ducked in to one of the auditoriums and watched a very corny video of the history of the building, its eponymous benefactor (actually named Griffith Griffith), all narrated by the inimitable but now deceased Leonard Nimoy.
The 12-inch telescope sits in another building. You can see it. But you can’t see through it. Or, at least, we couldn’t on this day.
Out on the patio area, we viewed the Los Angeles landscape from below. There was some cloud covering and so the view from the higher elevation provided an interesting silhouette of the skyscrapers downtown. It was a lovely, warm, late autumn outing.
Now, back to work.
Sherry & George 