Serendipity

I was recently out of town briefly. While most of that will eventually be covered in the travel blog, there are some things that don't really fit into a review that I would still like to write about. 

There were events one could not expect.

First of all, let me say that the traffic in the Los Angeles area deserves its reputation; getting through and from LAX to our hotel took far longer than it should have.

Our initial plan had been that we would go from the hotel to the Griffith Observatory, then down to Hollywood Boulevard to see Grauman's, bits of the Walk of Fame, and Funko Pop and Amoeba Music. The Walk of Fame stretches out a long way, but we didn't have any specific stars we wanted to see, so the .9 miles between the theater and the shops would be sufficient. Then we could walk back to our hotel.

By the time we got to the hotel we were all hungry, so we decided to reverse that. The observatory is open pretty late, and we didn't think any of it would take too long.

We found the theater, which connects to a mall with a food court. We ate lunch and started toward the two stores.

We kept walking and walking like pioneer children.

I have seen mapping applications be clearly wrong on distance before -- most notably once in Sacramento -- but there was also this sense that we were no longer on such a touristy stretch of road. Realizing the plan wasn't working, we requested a ride to the observatory from where we gave up.

It turned out we were going in the wrong direction. I would say we should have been able to figure it out, but it took me several more looks at the map before I did... we were already back home. 

I do remember talking with the driver and she said "You should have just been able to keep going straight." I said that we did and she looked at me like that wasn't right.

The issue was the way that the street our hotel was on intersects with the boulevard. I was not familiar enough with the area to have a sense of direction there. Maybe we would have realized it sooner if we were only looking for those landmarks and not for lunch when we first got on to the boulevard. 

Regardless, we turned right for the theater when Funko and Amoeba would have been to the left, and that made all the difference.

Because we had a lot of time on the next day, we decided we could work in a trip to what we had not seen yet. As we had not worked out what the navigational issue had been, we just took a rideshare there, even though it was not a long distance. 

We had been told there was always a line at Funko; there was. They hadn't opened yet, we weren't worried; we just got in line.

There seemed to be more crowd control than we were expecting and people were getting wrist bands. That did not appear to be normal.

It turns out that Funko Pop had just sold their one billionth figure. We were in line for their Thanks a Billion! party.

We were also among the first 100, so we got gift bags and tickets. There were raffle tickets and tickets for the counters they had set up in there for Pink's Hot Dogs and Trejo's Donuts.

(When they said "Trejo's" was in there, for a moment I thought maybe there was an awesome celebrity guest, but it was just the doughnuts. That was still very generous.)

We just wanted to look around the store. Wow!

In fact, we gave away most of our loot. 

We had just eaten breakfast and visited the Dunkin in the same building, because we don't have Dunkin here anymore. We were too full for Pink's and Trejo's. 

Also, we had places to be, so we couldn't stay around for a lot of the raffles. They were every fifteen minutes, so I did get to listen for some, but it was time to move on. We found the couple we had been talking with in line and gave them our tickets, then went over to Amoeba.

Looking in the bag, we each had some stickers and pins, a free Bigfoot figure, a $10 Amoeba gift certificate, and then coupons and certificates for Pink's, Trejo's, and a sushi place.

The gift certificates could not be combined or used on something for less than $10. (Getting gift certificates to a place that sells records and books when I have so thoroughly moved away from buying things is its own topic.)

Maria did find something she wanted, and then gave one certificate to the guy in line ahead of her. I was having a hard time locating the third one, but found it in time to give it to someone on our way out. One person was thrilled, the other confused, but I hope she was able to use it or give it to someone else.

We weren't going to be around long enough to use the food coupons, so we gave those to the hotel staff. There was at least one person there who had a use for it.

One Bigfoot has been a gift now, and there are some plans for the other things.

There is totally a way in which just going the right direction would have been faster and would not have changed that much about accomplishing our goals.

What happened instead allowed us to spread some good will, and was also way more interesting.