Back From the West

Hey all y'all. I was out west last week enjoying the spoils of my radio contest victory in which I won a stay at the London Hotel just off Sunset in West Hollywood and dinner at Gordon Ramsay's restaurant at the same hotel.

Really, I need to get myself a laptop. When we travel, Ben takes his work computer with us. Innocent googling of tourist traps and directions to freak shows are allowed. Logging in to my blogger account - not. There's lots and lots I want to say about our trip, but I haven't got the time to plop it all down in one post. Maybe I'll just be an ass and sprinkle little tidbits in all my conversations, on my own blog and yours too: 'Well, when I was following that Bentley up the Pacific Coast Highway it dawned on me....." Yeah, no.

Perhaps you recall that before I left for this trip I positively expected to hate Newport Beach and to love L.A. Well, I got that backwards. (Except that "The O.C.^TM is so conservative there were McCain signs in the art gallery windows. I ain't saying I'd live there!) More on that later.

Here's a nugget: We had lunch at a sidewalk cafe in Venice Beach. Across the sidewalk was a black man selling Barack Obama t-shirts. A mother and her young son, also black, walked up to the man's table. I saw the man put his hand on the young boy's shoulder, bend down and whisper something to the boy. That child grinned from ear to ear and happily put on his Obama shirt. I've no idea what was said between the man and the child, but what I saw on the boy's face was what Obama is all about - Hope. The future. Change.