Orange squeezing

Friday and Sunday just gone were social days; basically, days given over to seeing friends I have in the area. So far, it has involved meeting at some fast food place that's easy for us to get to, or a compromise. Friday was at a Carl's Junior in Anaheim and I met up with my friends Ernie and Nick. We ended up sitting in the fast food place for five hours just chatting away about stuff - apart from his impression artistry, Ernie's a mathematician and we were discussing that as well as a whole heap of stuff. Nick, in the meantime, doodled a lot in my sketchbook, often on a tangent from what we were all discussing. He has a very off-the-wall style of humour and is a great cartoonist. Sunday, I met up with Stephanie at a Starbucks (one of about ten of them) in a place called Temecula; a compromise between us being up in the hills east of LA and her being down San Diego way. She's a really good artist, but she doesn't give herself enough credit. We chatted and reminisced about the olden days and our mutual friends whom she hasn't seen for a while. On the way down, Rob and I went through what passes for countryside around here - seems to be mainly hills and quarries with the occasional ranch or fishing hole thrown in, and isolated housing developments.

Saturday, meanwhile, involved seeing more of Orange County. We had lunch at a Mexican joint in Tustin called Jalapeños; but thankfully, the stuff they served was very mild. I had a chicken quesadilla, which is...uh...kinda like a pizza, except not, involving melted cheese. Very nice. We then drove through more of eastern Tustin and I saw Rob's school, and then made our way down through Irvine towards the University of California campus there. Along the way the road we were on went beside the railway, and I noticed there was no fencing along it like they do in Brisbane - I guess this is due to the fact that there's no electric gantries, but I still found it very odd. I also managed to snag some pictures of the old Tustin blimp hangars when we went past. We drove around and through the university - it's set up as a series of concentric rings - and then on to the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach. Which was closed. Rob was perplexed, and put it down to "funding cuts".

So, we drove on a bit further, down the coast to Laguna Beach. The place reminds me of a cross between Noosa and Coolum, in that it's a trendy kind of place with people living right up the hilltops with a nice beach and a road to it that goes right along the very coast. I noticed a big difference between their beaches and ours: as their lifeguard system is different to our own surf lifesaver system and they don't set up swimming areas, everyone positions themselves all along the beach instead of having clusters of people in front of the swimming areas followed by expanses of emptiness. So, there's people up and down the beach.

We left via the inland route, which weaves you through Laguna Canyon - I can see why everything gets called canyon around here, because the hills are so steep and they come right together at these narrow points where a road can get through. So, you drive along Route 133 from Laguna Beach through the wilderness, until you crest a hill and suddenly you're in downtown Irvine. You can catch glimpses of suburbia through the gaps in the hills, but it's a very odd change. We kept going past Irvine and joined the 241, which is the toll road through the hills to the east of Orange County - it goes so high in places that my ears popped, especially when we were on the last long downhill stretch to the 91 and Gypsum Canyon; this is what helps to create the traffic bottleneck through to Corona of any given afternoon. That night we had Applebee's, which is a sort of Sizzler-esque place but all table service. I had Fiesta Lime Chicken and some mozarella sticks - they ought to bring those things out to Australia at some time, because they are good.

Monday was, again, given over to exploring Orange County - Rob is a proud native of the OC, hence our going into that part of the world on multiple occasions. As we headed off around lunchtime, filling our bellies was our first port of call and we went to the South Coast Plaza shopping centre. Rob calls it a "luxury shopping mall", and I can see his point as there are all assortments of high-end international fashion names inside, such as Tiffany's, Cartier, Montblanc...so on and so forth. Fortunately, there is a moderately-priced carvery there, and I had a turkey sandwich. They put avocado on it, and apparently that's a very California thing to do - tastes good, too! We explored the place a bit, taking in all of the big name small shops and the McDonald's menu. It seems like they have only a couple of burgers the same as we do; they seemed to have a lot of Angus burgers as well, so either it was due to its location or else it's fairly standard that they have high-end Angus beef burgers as compared to the standard patties. I've yet to actually go into a McDonald's here; I'm having things like Applebee's and IHOP and In-n-Out Burger and all sorts of American delicacies instead of the standard one, so far.

One of the big video game companies, Blizzard, has its headquarters in the research park at the university, and, if the pictures are correct, they have a big 12-foot statue in their courtyard of an orc riding a wolf - virtual art becomes sculptural art. So, we went on the hunt for the company headquarters, and we drove around and around the non-descript office park until we gave up, orcless. The buildings there all seem to have the same numbers - there was more than one 131 for the same office park, which drove us mad. So, we went on to try the art museum in Newport Beach again, but they were still closed. At least this time there were people in the carpark, but it seems that they're closed until Sunday to set up for their next lot of exhibitions. Maybe we'll get there yet.

Two defeats under our belt, we drove back across Orange County to the Irvine Park. It's an area set aside for basically that purpose, and includes a miniature steam train ride and gentle hiking and the Orange County Zoo which seems to be mostly given over to horses for riding through the park, and a family of peacocks. We trekked out to the back portion of the park which has been kept in a more natural state - Rob said that this is what everything looked like before it all got paved over. Basically, dry hills covered in low scraggly vegetation with yellow wildflowers in the spring and dry wash creeks. Far more dry than around Brisbane. We then headed for home over the Anaheim Hills, and Rob talked about the fire that happened last November. Once we ran alongside the 91, you could see the scorch marks where the fire had just climbed the sides of the hills and into suburbia; there were also burnt out patches of median and other isolated spotfire places just from the blowing embers.

Somewhere in the middle of that, Sunday night, I think, we had IHOP. It stands for "International House of Pancakes" and, despite being there for dinner later in the evening, they still serve breakfast-style food; Rob's brother, Edward, basically had something that could pass for a typical hot breakfast. I had a chicken and mushroom crepe while Rob had something involving French toast - something I've yet to try over here.