Tsunami Saturday Laguna Beach!
Well, the Orange County Tea Party Patriots had an event scheduled yesterday in Laguna Beach, but it was cancelled due to weather conditions and tsunami warnings. I left the Temecula rally a little after Noon hoping to catch the tail end of the Laguna rally. I texted my good friend Megan and got word the event had been cancelled. I thought I'd hang out a little bit anyway. Walking down the boardwalk, tourists check out the surf conditions at the main beach lifeguard station:
A closer look at the tower:
The conditions at about 1:30pm:
Walking back across PCH now, looking north. That's Laguna Canyon Road at the second intersection with the green light. It's normally bumper-to-bumper at this stretch on the weekends, especially in the summer. Not too many folks heading to the beach on this day. Notice the movie theater up the road at right? I'm heading over that way, to the Starbucks just before it:
But I checked out the newsstand first. Actually, I didn't need to buy anything, which is unusual for me. I can read the New York Times online, at least for now, and I wasn't in the market for fashion or gossip rags:
Okay, here's a quick couple of shots of the Laguna Cinemas. "The Hurt Locker" is playing (Jules Crittenden's got an interesting post up on that today, "The Ass-Kick Locker"):
"Alice in Wonderland" is playing at Midnight next Thursday. Cool:
Heading back over to the coffee shop, which was doing good business:
This is the Fingerhut Gallery, featuring a life-size Cat-in-the-Hat sculpture. Asking price was $150,000:
The place might use some of that cash to hire a landscaper -- that ivy foilage needs a trim!
The obligatory surfer-boutique-on-PCH photograph:
I said hello to Thomas, who was cruising the sidewalks for recyclables. Nice guy. He was kind enough to pose for a picture:
Here's the sculpture of Eiler Larsen (1890-1975), the Laguna Beach Greeter:
The plaque's a little hard to read, but there's more on Eiler at the Los Angeles Times:
Okay, heading back south (which is an incline here, next to the Laguna Hotel, along with the Miranda Galleries):
Okay, walking back to my car now. Here's the obligatory downtown Laguna Beach cottage residence photograph. A beautiful home:
Now this is the ultra-obligatory Laguna Beach enviro-Subaru-owner's-car-with-a-Barbara-Boxer-for-Senate-2010-bumper-sticker photograph. I was about to hop into my car and I noticed the Boxer-for-Senate sticker and said to myself: Yes! It doesn't get any better than this. Orange County is known as the heartland of California conservatism, but the Laguna artists' colony is a left-wing bastion in south county. Laguna, which includes a substantial gay community, voted overwhelmingly against Proposition 8 in 2008:
Okay, that's it for today ... more great blogging throughout the week -- so tell a friend!
You need to see if that newsstand carries The Weekly Standard!!
ReplyDeleteDonald -- thanks for the memories. One of my first jobs was as an usher at the South Coast movie theater in Laguna that is now showing "Hurt Locker"...I worked there in 1981 and the summer of 1982 when "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" was a hit. It was a lot of fun!
ReplyDeleteI used to live off of the canyon during the time when the Brotherhood discovered just exactly how much real money, the kind you could spend on 911 SCs as opposed to money in good vibrations, and what was once sort of a tourist town is just that now. And with a political orthodoxy that seems at odds with $1-2 million bungalows. But the military poster and book store is still there and still some legitimate surf shops. As to the rest...!
ReplyDeleteI also became friendly with the police chief who became world famous for arresting Timothy Leary who for a change had his clothes on. The lifeguard shack on the beach is a reconstruction as the old one, part of a gas station, got washed along with the Main Beach out to sea one winter.