Off the Beaten Path

I've spent a lot of time in Big Places like Los Angeles, or Washington, D.C., or London and Madrid. Big Places like these are great, but they suffer a little bit from the Big Attractions. In L.A., for example, I've played host to several friends who have never really spent much time there, and I generally feel pressured to take them to Hollywood, or Universal Studios, or Disneyland, or the beach.

But often my favorite excursions happen off the beaten path. I love exploring the sort-of-mundane, or stumbling across the unexpected. Brian enjoys this as much as I do. The first time I ever met up with him in California, over two years ago, I took him not to Hollywood, but to a little 50's hamburger dive in Montrose, and a trail running beneath the bridges of Pasadena, and a terrible live reading of a dramatization of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at Vroman's bookstore, and the fact that we just stumbled into the live reading, completely unplanned, as well as the fact that it was awful, made it even more awesome.

Pasadena bridges.

This Christmas I had the chance to be in California with Brian once again. While we were trying to decide how to spend our one completely free day there, I remembered something a classmate had told me way back in high school geometry, about a well-known location that happens to be located in Tujunga, the city that neighbors my hometown. I'd never confirmed that my classmate was telling me the truth. I'd just accepted it at face value, and even repeated the fact to friends. The moment I remembered this location, though, I knew that I needed to finally verify that it existed, and that I needed to take Brian there, and that I needed to not tell him where I was taking him until we arrived.

We started the day at Griffith Observatory, where we toured the free museum and ate lunch on a park bench overlooking the Hollywood sign. Then I typed the mystery address into my phone and had Brian navigate us back onto the freeway, and into Tujunga, and up into a nice-ish but modest neighborhood. I was a little giddy with excitement to see Brian's reaction, and I was not disappointed - the moment the house came into view at the top of the street, he knew exactly where we were, and acted appropriately and genuinely giddy himself.

In case you don't recognize it, it's the E.T. house! From E.T.! 

Here's a screenshot from the movie. The house itself hasn't changed much in 30 years.

On our way to the E.T. house, we came across a couple surprises, and so we had to stop for more pictures on our way back. There was the gingerbread house that looked as though it ought to be smack in the middle of Disneyland, but instead sat between very ordinary-looking homes and apartment buildings.

And then there was a grassy park filled with small rock towers, each of which had been topped with a Santa hat. It looked like a field of stone snowmen.

We both agreed that the day had turned out even awesomer than we'd hoped.

It's not that Brian and I don't enjoy Big Attractions - after all, we went on a cruise to the Bahamas for our honeymoon and stayed a couple extra days at Universal Studios Florida (Harry Potter World inclusive). But I also love that I can take Brian to, say, the annual holiday open house at teeny-tiny Days Market, or that Brian will surprise me for date night with an excursion to a little local Brazilian festival, or to the Nickelcade.

I've never lived anywhere, big or small (from L.A. to Ann Arbor, and D.C. to Provo) where there hasn't been something to explore. I think I inherited at least some of this sense of exploration from my parents, because I have memory upon memory of summertime "adventures" to tiny museums and parks, and even when I visited Hawaii (one of the ultimate Big Attractions), my parents were eager to show off small sites, like the best banana bread stand, with which they were already well acquainted after just one trip. I hope that as our little family grows, Brian and I can pass along this sense of exploration not just of the big, but of the small and the intimate and the strange and the out-of-the-way.