Dinner and a Late Morning in Glendale

Glendale, CA - Sun, 17 Oct 2021, 11:30am

Saturday night we drove back to Glendale after visiting Griffith Observatory for sunset (previous blog). Unlike many other places around LA, Glendale is actually a separate city rather than just a neighborhood of LA. It has a population of 200,000 and is located about 8 miles north of downtown LA., nestled below the Verdugo Mountains. Here's a picture from our hotel:



As you can see in the picture, Glendale has a well developed city center area. Along with it is a pretty good selection of restaurants in the shopping and entertainment district a few blocks from our hotel. We've never really "done" Glendale before so we decided to give it a try for dinner Saturday. Unfortunately our first two choices were closed. But hey, that's part of the value of having a good selection, right? We ended up at an Argentine restaurant... where we all ate Italian food. Hawk and Nicole had gnocchi (spelled ñoqui, because Spanish language) and I had a pizza and split a calamari fritti appetizer.

"LOLWUT," you might be thinking, "Italian food at an Argentine restaurant?" But it's not too surprising. As I learned when we visited Argentina a few years ago, the country grew with a lot of Italian immigrants in the early 20th century. So just like today in the US where we have proud Italian-Americans and all of us are familiar with Italian inspired cuisine, many Argentines speak with Italian accents and enjoy Italian derived food.

Dinner ran later than we expected. First it took us until 8:30 to walk to a restaurant that was open. Then, the kitchen was slow. I don't think we got home until close to 11. Hawk petered out quickly and went to bed. I stayed up a bit longer and took a shower to refresh then crashed around 11:30.

Sunday morning we slept in. I snoozed my 8am alarm until almost 9. Hawk slept in a bit longer. We got some breakfast food from downstairs and brought it back to the room, where we puttered around until 11.

Status and Points

The hotel, BTW, is pretty nice. The pic I shared above isn't a view from our room; it's a view from the other side, looking north toward the Verdugo Mountains. I might have requested a room with such a view but it was already after midnight when we arrived the other night. And, this is a Hyatt Place. I don't have any elite status with Hyatt to request minor upgrades such as a room with a better view.



Hyatt is currently my... sixth?.. most used hotel program. Yeah, I haven't stayed with Hyatt in a long time. It's not that their hotels are poor. In fact they're generally very nice. The comfort and class I've enjoyed at this Hyatt Place (a limited-service brand) this weekend makes me consider shifting more business toward them. The challenge, though, is that Hyatt has a small footprint. While this Hyatt Place is a notch above segment competitors like IHG's Holiday Inn Express, the latter has a way bigger footprint. There are 5x as many IHG properties as Hyatts in the US. That's why Hyatt fell to sixth on my list.

Lack of status with Hyatt didn't stop me from getting this hotel on points, though. I transferred them from my Chase Sapphire Preferred credit card. Transfers to Hyatt are actually one of the best uses of Chase's Ultimate Rewards points. I got a value of 1.5 cents per point (cpp) with this stay. That's much better than taking cash back at 1cpp.

Anyway, time to roll. We've got more sightseeing to do today!

The Getty

Another on the list of things I never did when I lived in L.A. years ago was visit "The Getty". The J. Paul Getty Museum at The Getty Center, as its full name goes, is an art museum perched on a hillside overlooking West L.A. It's not even that far from where I used to live. I can practically see my old apartment from it. More on that in a bit.

One of the newspaper stories I read about The Getty years ago was that the buildings and the view were as amazing as any of the art inside. It mentioned all the swaths of travertine stone.... When I got there on Sunday I saw enough Travertine that I could believe the average elevation in Italy sank a few meters after they mined all this stuff out!



The environs are stunning. Fancy stone everywhere. Gardens. Fountains. From the entrance building we looked at the doors to the first art display, turned right, and started exploring the gardens.



From the many observation decks on the buildings there are expansive views across the L.A. basin. I was able to see the towers of downtown L.A. (left in the picture above) west to Century City and Westwood (center) across the 405 (right) and all the way to the Pacific Ocean (not pictured). This is an example of where I could practically see the apartment I used to live in years ago. It was a few blocks away from where Santa Monica Boulevard crossed the 405. You can't see the intersection, per se, but I recognized in the view the trio of buildings (which I always called "the three sisters") right there and could place my old apartment fairly accurately from that.

But the art? Yeah, there's art. It's inside. It's the kind of stuff that stupidly wealthy people acquire. The kind of stuff that used to be in the Palace of Versailles, owned by King Louis XIV or members of his court. Y'know, now owned by people who consider themselves the modern equivalent of King Louis XIV or his royal court. But outside....



Outside, even a 12-lane highway looks nice. This is the 405 rising up into the Sepulveda Pass.

Inside, there's more art. We looked at it. We were... not entirely impressed. Around 3:30 we called it a day and drove our car on the 405 over the Sepulveda Pass to get late lunch at a delicious Mexican restaurant.