This was our last full day in Los Angeles. We had several museums still undone, but basically decided to do one thing today. We chose the Autry museum.  I also wondered if there was such a thing as a driving tour of LA sites, and a little internet research showed there was, led from an app. When I looked at a map, it became obvious that it made the most sense to do the tour first.

(Also, the Autry museum was pretty much where the Hollywood sign was. I wish I had done better planning about where things were so we could have grouped activities better. But it may not have made a difference, given Dad’s reduced energy level.)

We had pastries from the downstairs lobby’s cafe, then set off.  For some reason, Google Maps took us to not quite where the driving tour started, but we drove around this great hilly park and saw a  lot of great views.

The driving tour, which took a bit of getting used to how it worked, turned out to be mostly a disappointment. For instance we saw the corner where the end of Chinatown was filmed. OK. But we did see City Hall and the Echo Park lake that was used for all the lagoon scenes of Gilligan’s Island.  Our own hotel was one of the sites, too. But it was disappointing, especially since the concept of a driving tour led by an app was a really good one. We could have purchased similar tours for Monterey and San Francisco, but didn’t bother. (in retrospect, I wish we had seen more of the City Hall stuff, it looks so architecturally interesting in The Lincoln Lawyer. Also, that funicular, which was a plot point in some season of Bosch. We didn’t see it, but a little research once I got home showed me it was actually pretty close to the hotel. If I hadn’t had Dad with me, I would have spent more time walking around downtown from the hotel, would have probably seen a lot of neat things.)

Now about 1130, we went to the Autry Museum.  We got through about half the basement floor, which was actually kind of interesting (a chuck wagon, for instance, with labels and documentation as to how it worked), also a lot of guns.

Unfortunately, Dad, who had been dealing with a particular digestive issue all trip, made worse by the shock of the fall two days ago, asked me to take him to urgent care because he was really uncomfortable. So that’s what we did.  And they saw him reasonably quickly and the prognosis was basically mostly that he hadn’t been drinking enough water, and the solution was over-the-counter stuff. (which we obtained and it worked and that’s all I’m going to say about that)

Back to the hotel so Dad could take that stuff and let it work its magic.  It was now almost 300, so I zoomed down to the brasserie and got us two tuna bowls for late lunch, which were really good – tuna salad, marinated bell peppers, quinoa, arugula (ugh, not a fan), cucumbers, and bread.  I pretty much at all of mine except left a lot of arugula, Dad ate some and saved his. (then it turned out that he didn’t really like tuna salad. Oops, didn’t know.)

Dad spent the rest of the afternoon napping while I got some sit-down planning stuff done. Lunch was so late we decided to skip dinner, just watched some TV and went to bed early.

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A bit of LA wrapup – I’d never been to the city before, and C had been and hated it, so I was glad I got to finally see it. I thought it was really interesting. Certainly found the weather pleasant. The driving was sometimes annoying, but by no means a deal breaker. I could certainly see it as a place to live if you had a reason to be there. We didn’t have the best weather the day we went to the beach, and I really wanted to walk on the Santa Monica Pier, and we didn’t get to do that. Oh well.

If I have a reason to go back, I’d like to do the Academy Museum and the Walk of Fame and the La Brea Tar Pits and some other touristy stuff we missed or Dad wasn’t interested in. But, like Vegas, I don’t see me going back unless the fates line up so a return trip there is an obvious thing to do. (also, now it’s a place that needs to be rebuilt. So awful.)