Leaving the bubble

As you may have noticed, I love Hermosa Beach. I also, as previously posted, like being in a comfortable rut. So two months into our new life here and I have established a fairly small radius within which I operate. It's about the size of Hermosa Beach. Well, we have everything we need right here, why would I ever leave?

It took our first house guest to drag me out of the bubble. Lady P's godfather, my old and very dear friend, The Gambler, has come to town. He loves being schooled in animal sounds by Lady P, and jogging along the Strand with me. But after a couple of days in the bubble I sensed he had itchy feet.

So it was that we hired bikes from the Hermosa Cyclery and took the bike path up to the Marina Del Rey.

As we passed the industrial sites of El Segundo I started to doubt the merits of leaving the bubble

...but before too long we were enjoying the cheesy delights of 70s tourist spot 'Fisherman's Village'

... and we got to gawp at plenty of beachfront real estate on our way too

Emboldened, I braved the freeway traffic to take him even further afield. The Getty Center was well worth the drive, and an afternoon's mooching around Santa Monica was fun.

But it all started to look a bit hairy again when we ventured into hipster paradise, Downtown LA, full of warehouses and pop up shops and moustachioed boys in jazz shoes. We had a lunch reservation at Factory Kitchen and parked a couple of blocks away (being the Brits we are). Wow, those downtown blocks are long and bleak.

DTLA. Not as pretty as Hermosa.

Lunch was great but the walk to and from was not. 'Hurried and tense' is not my ideal post-meal constitutional. Having learnt our lesson we drove the remaining 2 blocks to the heart of Little Tokyo. A brief sampling of Japanese American history and coffee rounded off our big city adventure perfectly.

Then it was back to the beach. Phew.

It was really great, being forced out of the 90254 bubble. There's a whole exciting world out there. But The Gambler's gone now. So TLOML are now enjoying not leaving the bubble again till someone else makes us.