Another morning waking at 315, drowsing until 6.  Got up, showered, packed.  Dad didn’t want breakfast yet, but we did finally get his laptop up and running.  [rant omitted about how he uses too many passwords and forgets them]. He putzed around online while I finished up.

Rolled our luggage down the endless carpeted hallway, elevator down, self-checkout, and thus to the parking garage. Where we got trapped – something was going on with the automated exit and the two people in front of us had the hardest time getting the gate to go up. Frustrating.

Our goal was to hit a drugstore on the way out of town, preferably with a parking lot, and I’d scoped out a CVS right on Las Vegas Boulevard north of the Strip.  We drove out there, and bought waters, sodas, ice, a cooler, clip-on shades and tissues for the car.  Then across the street to 7/11 to get breakfast – the only meal we’ve had so far that was under $10.00 (for both!).

The drive through the desert was uneventful, although quite pretty.  Patti had sent us an article about all sorts of interesting things to visit or do on that drive, but we weren’t in the mood. We listened to classical music, then a political podcast, then pop music.  We stopped at a halfway point to pee.

It certainly got more trafficky once we got to LA, but we never really had any problem.  I’d decided to have us stay downtown, not sure why. (I’m the first to admit that I was somewhat slapdash planning this trip.) When we got to the hotel (the Biltmore!), it made the most sense to do the self-park first. Turns out you have to drive in tight little circles up many flights, past the valet parking spaces and tenant parking spaces, to reach the guest parking spaces, but there’s an elevator and it wasn’t a big deal and we got very good at this somewhat tricky operation.

[I’m also omitting my attempts to micromanage Dad rolling his luggage and getting stuck on sidewalk curbs or blocking driveway entrances, but I was in mother hen mode.]

Got our key, had a bit of fun finding the elevators, another long schlep to the room.  Room basically nice, but maybe a bit shabby? The only extra furniture is an armchair. At least we have coffee makings. We were there for 4 nights.

By now, it’s about 2:40 and we hit up a brasserie on the block just in time for a late lunch – really good. I had a banh mi sandwich, Dad had some sort of complicated salad, and I grabbed a little bag of cookies, too. Then we got pedicures! We’d kind of wanted to do that at some point, and the nail place was right there between the bakery and the hotel. So that was nice.

Back to the room, where Dad went into total Dad mode and first decided that there weren’t enough plugs in the corner of the room and we should call the front desk (and do what? Have them install more sockets?), and then that the fridge was broken and needed to be fixed. I’m sitting on my bed trying to line up tours for the next day and he’s calling the front desk and pulling me into the drama because he can’t hear the phone very well. And at some point, we had a maintenance guy in the room, with little English, calling the head of housekeeping, and about four different conversations happening. End result? Actually, there were enough plugs (Dad had missed one) and the fridge was working (just not all that well, but we could turn it up colder) and nothing was wrong in the first place. That was an hour of my life I’ll never get back. Reminded me of some times traveling with Charles where he threw some big fuss about something that clearly no one had the power to change, and pulling me into the drama with him. I’m going to call this “tilting at windmills”, I think.

I had actually done some planning as far as creating online maps with what attraction was where, but it turned out that trying to read these maps on a phone or an ipad or a laptop was kind of pointless. It also turned out that many things we wanted to see (the car museum, the Academy museum, the art museum) were literally right next to each other, and nowhere near us. Oh well. Dad went down to the front desk and got a tourist map for us, and I managed to book a Paramount studio tour for the next day.

Now we’re both ready for a drink. He’d found out from the concierge that there was a building a block or so away that was very tall and had a rooftop bar and restaurant, called 71Above.  So we went there, very classy and great views. They tried to push the very price three-course pre-fix dinner menu at us, until they also made it clear we could order anything a la carte. We’d only had lunch about three hours beforehand. So we had cocktails and wine and one item each off the menu – I got the octopus, and he got the prawns, plus a side of really good bread.  Really really nice meal, maybe overly fussy with the different emulsions and frippery, but tasty and terrific.

Back to the hotel, and we both went to bed about 830, learning no lesson at all.