I’m finally coming out of the fog of jetlag to tell you how things went at Left Coast Crime in Los Angeles. The Omni Hotel was a palace, the help cheerful and friendly. The conference organizers were charming and diligent.
One afternoon some of us took a walking tour with Gary Phillips, where I took some pictures. I meant to upload them to the blog at once, but technical problems arose involving the Kodak and the Macbook. Now that I’m home with the old PC, here they are:
Here is the Los Angeles City Hall. You’ve seen it in a hundred movies.
Here is our tour guide, Gary Phillips. He kindly paused on the steps to let me take his picture.
We continue the tour. Here is City Hall again, reflected in the windows of another municipal building.
This is the world’s shortest railway, or so it is said, known as Angel’s Flight. It was right next to our hotel, which is built on Bunker Hill, once the home of Los Angeles’s rich people. The cook and the butler used to take the funicular down to the market below, and when they came back up the butler would carry the food the cook had bought. 
If you go down Angel’s Flight and through the market right across the street, you come to the Bradbury Building, a breathtaking piece of architecture where many movies were made.
Here I am standing in it, awestruck.
With all this travelogue I haven’t mentioned my panel, which went well, or the new friends I made, who were lovely, or the good time I had playing hooky from the conference with Harold, walking up and down the steep streets. I haven’t mentioned our one-night stay in Beverly Hills, or Rodeo Drive, where I tried on a seven hundred dollar jacket and was relieved to find that it didn’t fit.
I cannot close, however, without showing you one of the main things that I went to California to see, and that’s the native vegetation as it used to be when Emily Daggett Weiss went west to Hollywood in 1913. My old friend Chip took us on a special trip to find me some weeds, half an hour north of Hollywood. Sagebrush! You can’t imagine how nice it is in the winter, green and fragrant.
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