Losing California

[vovat]

After OzCon ended on Sunday, we rested for a while back at the motel, and then went to get dinner at a place called Joey with Stephanie. I had a crispy chicken sandwich. She wasn't feeling well, and we were still tired after all that Ozzing, so we went our separate ways after that. We did see her dog Chelsea for a few minutes, though. On Monday, our flight was late at night and we had to check out of the motel at 11, so we stopped a few places mostly to kill time. One was a comic shop in Burbank called House of Secrets, which we'd seen on the way there.

It's at the intersection of Lamer Street, which must have been some jock's idea. (I'm kind of behind the times with my jokey stereotypes, aren't I?)

Comic stores generally tend to have interesting decor, a mix of various pop cultural figures.


Moe Szyslak was scowling at customers next to a Rom the Space Knight omnibus, and there was stained glass window of Mjolnir.

I bought two Disney comics before leaving. Then we ate at a Sizzler, another restaurant we used to have in the northeast, but not anymore. I remember going to one near Sesame Place. And this child on a poster was right about the cheese toast.

There was a convertible with a teddy bear in it in the parking lot, but we never found out any details behind it.

Our next stop was the Travel Town Museum in Griffith Park.

It's focused on the railroads of the area, and is mostly free, although the train ride does cost money. It's not an actual historical train, but more like one at an amusement park.

There was an exhibit on Fred Harvey, the train hospitality magnate, and there's kind of an Oz connection there as Judy Garland was in a movie called The Harvey Girls.

The song "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe" was written for it.

Watch on YouTube

While there, I bought a bottle of orange cream soda. Later, we stopped at a game store called Geeky Teas and Games, which is also a cat rescue. There was a sign on the door of one room that said not to meow at the kittens, and I assume it was meant for me specifically.

Tabletop role-playing was something I always thought I'd probably have gotten into if I'd had friends growing up. Dungeons & Dragons has been so influential on the fantasy genre that concepts from it are pretty much unavoidable for me. I ended up buying Mille Bornes, a game I played a lot as a kid, and an Owlbear charm.

That kind of seems like a creature that would appear in an Oz book, doesn't it? No tea, geeky or otherwise, however. I overheard someone mentioning the Magic: The Gathering/Final Fantasy cards, for which I've seen a lot of cool art online recently.

Then we met up with Paul and Carolyn, whom we met at OzCon last year. They also brought dogs, three of them in fact. We got pizza and visited some filming sites in the area, specifically Michael Myers' house from Halloween and Pee-wee Herman's from Big Adventure, both of which had since been painted.

On the way back to the airport, we stopped at Randy's Donuts for the first time.

The doughnut that Homer Simpson used to stop the monorail is based on their sign, but I didn't know that back when that episode aired. We got to the airport later than we intended, and as it's difficult to sleep on a plane, we were awake for a long time before finally getting home. And it's way hotter here in Brooklyn than it was in LA, so we probably should have just stayed, but I do have a job, and my stuff is here.