Tuesday, July 27th, 2010--California limbo

Today was in between day--baseball tournament over, Peter arrived in town, one more day until we begin our trip northward up the coast. Most of the day was spent near the swimming pool at the Holiday Inn--Peter and Patrick, Max and the rest of the baseball team swam at long length through a warm Los Angeles afternoon. Alice was finishing up The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second of the Swedish thriller series, and making good progress. I'm reading the Mike Davis book City of Quartz, a book written in the early 1990's about the growth of LA--still relevant today and one of the favorite books of Bruce Diamond I remember from my post-Oberlin days.

We had several possible plans in the works for today, including trips to Pasedena or Claremont/McKenna, but none of them came to pass. Instead, it was mostly the pool and a late afternoon trip back to Walnut to see the finals of the tournment between Walnut and Simi Valley. Peter, Patrick, Max, and several others including Gary and Owen's mom Kierstyn played a whiffle ball tournament just prior to watching the game. The championship game was not very exciting, though it was nice to have a hometown element, as Walnut provided many of the fans for the game. Simi Valley was the better team and pulled away at the end to win by 6 or 7 runs.

Later that evening, we went to a Thai restaurant that we had heard was pretty good called the Banana Bay restaurant. Although it was just a few miles down the road from the hotel, the neighborhood was distinctly different--nearly every sign was in Korean or Chinese or Japanese. The restaurant itself was very good--spacious, crowded and very lively. The portions were very big, and they had a candy store and a giant fishtank in the lobby, as well as a Japanese cooking show on tv. Sean was reluctant to give straight answers to most questions. The fried taro was not so good, but the pad thai lasted until another evening.

Afterwards we walked around the faux village--a facade of french quarter style buildings and Alice discovered a Japanese-style photo booth arcade. We couldn't understand the directions for how to operate the machine, and got into a few debates about how to use it, however in the end--45 minutes too late--we got a set of family photos that will not be replicated. Back to the hotel and get ready to travel!