It’s been a pretty steamy weekend here, with temperatures in the mid-90s, a little early for summer heat, but what can you do? I guess we could be in Anchorage, which just got two feet of snow yesterday… We got up early Saturday morning to avoid the heat and headed out on a hike, or should I say, a “hike.” These two books we’re using, Walking L.A. and 60 Hikes within 60 Miles: Los Angeles, occasionally contain activities that don’t necessarily mesh with their titles. Sometimes a walk is more like a hike, up steep stairs and along dirt paths in a park, and sometimes, like yesterday, a hike is more like a walk. We were supposedly hiking the Jack Smith Trail in Mount Washington, but the trail was really just a series of directions for navigating a neighborhood. A nice neighborhood, for sure, but not really a hike. We walked the grounds of the old Mt. Washington Hotel, looked at one of the last stands of black walnut trees in the area, and enjoyed the views of downtown.
We spent most of the afternoon inside, keeping cool, with Aimee going shopping for today’s BBQ as I went over to Michael’s to help them with some furniture moving. When I was telling Michael what we’d done in the morning, he asked if it was near Eagle Rock, and I couldn’t really place the two in relation to one another. It reminded me that I’d been wanting to go to Eagle Rock anyway, so Aimee and I decided we’d head there for dinner at Oinkster and stop at the Soda Pop Stop as well, which is legendary for its crazy selection of sodas you’ve never heard of before. We got there much the same way we’d gone to Mt. Washington in the morning, down the 101, up the 110, and off at one of those scarily short exit ramps.
The Soda Pop Stop did not disappoint: the selection of unique and strange sodas and beers was pretty astounding. Cheerwine? Cucumber soda? Quench? We ended up with a few four-packs of soda, a Serbian beer, and a couple of pops to go. My Cheerwine was pretty much maraschino cherry juice, in a great way. We’ll need to go back there again sometime, if only to explore the beer selection better and check out the candy, which filled up the old grocery store’s produce section.
Dinner at Oinkster was also a scene, and I enjoyed my pulled pork sandwich and Fat Tire, which seemed like the perfect combination for a hot afternoon. Guys and their hotrods were set up in the parking lot, so the gearhead/classic car crowd was mixing with the local regulars and the hipster kids, all eating barbeque at a Filipino BBQ joint in an old Jim’s Burgers building. Ah, L.A.
More photos here.
This morning was another hot one, but we wanted to get in a little something before the BBQ, so we decided to do the East Silver Lake walk, which was, to be honest a lot more like a hike, with more steep staircases than I knew existed, up and down the hills around the reservoir. We saw some terrific homes, some anonymous and a number designed by Richard Neutra, along Neutra Place and Silver Lake Boulevard. A new and seemingly uninhabited house we spotted at the top of a windy staircase up from Earl Street:
And a Neutra home, particularly striking in the morning light as kids tumbled out of a minivan ready to go to a birthday party there (or next door, also a Neutra house. As Aimee said, people who live in houses designed by famous architects have birthday parties, too…)
We enjoyed the walk, worked up a sweat, and had a muffin and coffee at L.A. Mill, though neither a Clover cup, nor a Japanese siphon coffee, just a regular old iced coffee.
More photos of East Silver Lake here.
