I was not particularly interested in going to Los Angeles as I had already been there in 1924 but the glamour of the Hollywood movie stars was a strong attraction for Marj and Midge. We had to go. Besides, it would allow all of us to boast that we had seen the Pacific Ocean. I don’t know which road we took to get to the Los Angeles area but we went thru Barstow; we stopped for the night there. We had a sack full of oranges in the car, as our custom was to eat breakfast in our room instead of going to a restaurant; it saved time as well as money. We had proceeded some distance into California when we came to a checkpoint manned by men in uniform who asked if we had any citrus fruit. When we acknowledged that we did the office said, “You will have to throw it all away. No citrus fruit can be taken into the state of California; too much danger of it containing parasites.” When we had bought oranges the day before they were cheap and we had purchased a two or three days supply. Neither Yvette nor I could stand the thought of throwing them away; we decided to eat them right there, which we did, four or five apiece. They were big oranges too.
Our rooms in Los Angeles were in a small, Spanish style motel with tile floors and roof and geranium vines covering the white walls. Los Angeles has a beautiful setting with the Pacific Ocean to the west and south and mountains to the north. Coming from the east, tho, you have to cross a lot of dry desert to get to it. There wasn’t much we wanted to see or do in downtown Los Angeles; we spent most of our time exploring along the ocean, Beverly Hills, where most of the movie stars had big mansions, [and] Hollywood, where the studios were then. We, of course, had to go see the theater in downtown Hollywood in front of which the stars had written their names in the cement of the sidewalk, Mary Pickford, Norma Talmage, Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino. I have forgotten most of them, but everyone knew the movie stars in those days before TV was invented.
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Zion National Park, Las Vegas and Boulder (Hoover) Dam
Sequoia and King's Canyon National Parks