Great Los Angeles Walk

Los Angeles is known for a few things - one of them is cars. Lots of cars. Walking is rare in LA, because a complete dearth of any kind of planning has led to no centralization at all of anything, so you can't walk from anywhere you want to be to anywhere else you might want to be. And public transport is fairly poor - if you're lucky, there's a bus that goes from where you are to where you want to go. If you're really lucky, there's a subway. I've never been on the subway. Again, it's the fault of the sprawl, there aren't enough people in one place who are trying to get to another place to make it economic to build / run a decent public transport

So, Two years ago, someone called Mike decided to walk along Pico Boulevard. All the way along it. And the next year they decided to walk along Wilshire Boulevard. But they told some friends about it, who told some friends about it, and in the end about 100 people went, and they called it the Great Los Angeles Walk.

And this year they decided to walk along Santa Monica Boulevard. Except Santa Monica Boulevard is only 14 miles long, and that wasn't considered long enough, so they added a bit of Sunset Boulevard, and then a bit more so they could start at Union Station.

So Oma and I drove to Santa Monica, and then caught the bus to Union Station (although there's a subway stop a couple of miles from our house, this was actually quicker).

Susanne wanted to walk some of it, so we had to have a bizarre procedure where she would drive the car to me, I would then drive it forward a mile or two, and then walk back as fast as I could (to about a zillion comments that I was going the wrong way) so as to not violate the integrity of the walk. To preserve my integrity I then carried one of the boys as far as I could.

Daniel walked about three miles, and rode on my shoulders about another mile. He then burst into tears with exhaustion. Alex walked about the last mile with me, and then vomited.

Here's a bunch of people at the start (I was standing in the middle, so I couldn't get everyone, but there were an estimated couple of hundred.)



One advantage of walking is that you see all kinds of things you don't normally notice..






I think about 100 people took a photo of these next two:





Here is me and Opa, at the very end. Opa walked about the last mile, and a mile in the middle.