Don’t neglect your stories because 10 or 20 years later, you might find yourself browsing your memories and looking at a sequence of photos, you’ll discover that nothing much of those days still exists from the depths of your head. I’m writing this in early 2022, having just stayed at the Wilshire Motel in Los Angeles, so it is a no-brainer that our day started here, but the details are remote.

With that landmass in the background, I can be assured that Caroline and Jutta are standing on the beach in Santa Monica north of the pier, but that’s about it.

To make my task more difficult, I’ve gone ahead and chosen 19 images to include here; not that I’ll have enough to write about the day, but I like what I captured, and they do remind me of those days we made our first visit to the museum just below.

Here we are at the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades.

I can’t believe we could have chosen a more beautiful day to be here.

An early “Talk to the Hand” sculpture.

Please excuse the following images for not having anything noted about them, but, to be honest, I got nothing…well, aside from inspiration, respect, and admiration

I’d recognize this tiny shop in the heart of Los Angeles in a second; it is Daikokuya Little Tokyo, which, in my narrow opinion, has the best ramen on the west coast of America.

At the time of our visit, I was a huge fan of the work coming out of the YouTube channel Corridor Digital, and as luck would have it, I ran into this guy, Niko Pueringer, who was waiting on a to-go order. Shamelessly, I asked to snag a photo of this minor celebrity; what they were doing with special FX and short storytelling I thought was genius.

Taking up our nosebleed seats way in the back, yep, that’s the wall about four rows behind us. Before explaining the reason for our attendance, let me share a tiny bit of nostalgia about the Shrine Auditorium: the scene in the 1933 version of King Kong where Kong breaks out of chains while being exhibited on stage was filmed right here.

Now, on to the really big show, and I do mean REALLY BIG! Caroline, Jutta, nor I have ever attended a performance that featured 1011 people on stage, but that’s what Gustavo Dudamel has assembled before him as he conducts Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, and we were on hand so that we even got tickets for the extravaganza was a bit of a minor miracle.