California, Days 7-11

My apologies for the delay to this blog: unfortunately, sometime between getting off the plane in Heathrow and arriving back in Coventry, I lost my iPod Touch on which I had been writing the blog entries from California, and until now I haven't had time to reconstruct my movements and write up what I did in Los Angeles and Pasadena. Here, then, is a reasonably detailed summary of what I did for the four days I was in LA, and of the journey home.

On Friday 23rd September (Day 7), I spent the day exploring Pasadena on foot. After a brief visit to Tim's office on Caltech campus, I walked west into the centre of Pasadena. It was a pretty hot day, with temperatures peaking at 33C, but thanks to the desert climate of the area the humidity was relatively low, and so the temperature, while relatively uncomfortable, was much more bearable than anything I experienced in Japan last June, where even 28C was enough to force me indoors.

Nonetheless, after lunch in Subway, I headed indoors to escape the peak of the heat, to the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena's (and one of southern California's) best art museums. The museum houses European paintings ranging from the 14th century right up to the 20th century: some of its more notable exhibits include a self-portrait by Rembrandt, Dujardin's Denial of Peter, and Rubens's David Slaying Goliath.

The museum is also home to a large collection of south and south-east Asian art, with a number of incredible vast sculptures in stone and in bronze. Outside, in the courtyard garden, there are also a number of modern sculptures dotted around the gardens. I enjoyed a snack of pitta and houmous from the café while sitting outside in the shade.

After looking round the Norton Simon Museum, I wandered around the western part of Pasadena, chancing upon Gamble House, built by Charles and Henry Greene at the beginning of the 20th century, and one of the finest examples of understated yet elegant architecture in the city. Eventually I headed back through Memorial Park and past City Hall to Caltech campus, from where Tim and I headed back to his apartment for dinner and a quiet evening watching more Coupling.

On Saturday 24th (Day 8), Tim and I headed to the western side of LA to the Getty Center; like most of southern California, the easiest access is by road, so we headed west on the 134 freeway, continuing onto the 101, before heading south on the 405. The 405 runs across a mountain pass, connecting Santa Monica to Van Nuys, and is such a key artery that, not only does it already have five lanes in each direction, it is being widened to six - clearly needed as even mid-morning on a Saturday there were traffic jams!

The Getty Center is a vast, sprawling campus home to (part of) the J. Paul Getty Museum. The campus itself is set upon a hilltop overlooking Los Angeles to the south; parking is in an underground car park just off the freeway, with six levels underground, from which a cable-drawn tram took us up to the campus. In clear weather the campus features incredible views of the city; unfortunately coastal fog conspired to rob us of the best views, but it was still pretty incredible.

We spent most of the day there, looking round the vast collection of pre-20th century art, including paintings, sculptures, and illuminated manuscripts, spread across four buildings. The buildings are surrounded by wonderful gardens which are host to a wide variety of flowers in a circular field with a stream and waterfall running through the middle.

After nearly six hours on the campus, we headed back to Pasadena; instead of retracing our steps, we headed south on the 405, east on the 10 - literally through downtown LA - and then north along the aborted stub of the 710. The 710 was originally meant to connect Pasadena and the 210 to East LA and Long Beach; but one key section through South Pasadena would have involved demolishing hundreds of houses in one of the most affluent areas of southern California, and the plans have been on indefinite hold for over 40 years.

Instead, the 710 dumps all its traffic onto surface streets at Valley Boulevard, and so we wended our way through the streets of Pasadena. There are ambitious plans to complete the missing section with a huge 4.5 mile tunnel, but such plans have not yet got off the drawing board.

This "South Pasadena Gap" means there are no north-south freeways between the 5, running through downtown LA, and the 605, running along the San Gabriel River valley. Although the east-west distance between the 5 and the 605 is only 12 miles, that 12 miles is in one of the most densely populated areas of the US; that said, pro- and anti-completion lobbies have long argued about whether completing the 710 would alleviate or aggravate the notorious traffic congestion in LA.

In the evening, we watched Heat, an epic three-hour crime thriller set (appropriately) in downtown LA, written and directed by Michael Mann and starring Al Pacino and Robert De Niro; with some incredible action scenes I was literally on the edge of my seat.

Sunday 25th (Day 9) brought a fairly quiet day: Tim went to the dojo in the morning, after which we headed for lunch in Pasadena, before heading onto campus and discussing some maths. Caltech campus is beautiful: while more urban than Warwick campus, being integrated into the city blocks of Pasadena, the architecture and the landscape provides a wonderful environment in which to do research.

The tallest building on the campus is the Millikan Library, named after Robert Millikan, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who first successfully measured the charge on the electron, and who spent nearly 25 years as chairman of Caltech's executive council. The building stands ten floors high, and from the top floor one can see the San Gabriel Mountains to the north (though they were a little hazy on Sunday).

After a quiet Sunday evening, on Monday 26th (Day 10) I again spent the morning on Caltech campus; Tim had arranged for me to meet with Dennis Kochmann, another postdoctoral researcher, who has similar research interests to me, and we discussed a number of interesting mathematical questions. After lunch on campus, I headed into Pasadena to attempt the seemingly impossible: use public transport in southern California.

I walked to the north side of Pasadena to catch the Metro Gold Line from Lake station as far as Union Station in central downtown LA. They call them trains, and treat them like an underground metro system, but in reality they're what we would call trams, with the ability to run on tracks on streets as well as on dedicated tracks. The Gold Line between downtown LA and Pasadena opened in 2003, and runs every 12 minutes during the day (more at peak times, and less in the evenings), with the journey from Lake to Union Station taking just under 30 minutes.

Union Station itself is something of a timewarp, much like the Amtrak network as a whole: a throwback to what rail travel used to be like in Britain 50 years ago, with just one train a day to big destinations, and an apparent inability to just get a ticket and get on a train. Unfortunately I didn't get the opportunity to try Amtrak at all; all the more reason to go back, I guess!

I spent a couple of hours wandering around the centre of downtown LA: my first port of call was to City Hall, where there's an observation deck on the 28th floor where you can get a 360-degree panorama of the city. The views were very good, clearer than they had been from the Getty Center, although not being as high up meant some of the skyscrapers in the financial district towered over us.

I searched in vain for a bookshop, before heading towards Disney Hall, one of the most stunning pieces of modern architecture I've ever seen: home to LA's finest concert hall, designed by Frank Gehry, and opened in 2003, the building is an array of odd angles and sweeping curves covered in metal.

Finally, I headed back towards Union Station, passing over one of the bridges over the I-10 freeway. The 10 literally threads itself through downtown Los Angeles; lessons learned from ghettos created under freeways which were elevated through urban areas led to later freeways being sunk into cuttings through cities, such as the 10 through LA. It was quite odd to stand over a highway with four lanes in each direction with the skyscrapers of downtown LA almost in spitting distance.

My return trip from LA to Pasadena was during rush hour - I left Union Station at about 5:15pm - and I'm pleased to report that the train was pretty much full. So full that I was standing the whole way, which I didn't object to at all since I bagged a spot to stand at the front, looking into the driver's cab and out onto the track in front. The train thinned out gradually, and I got a seat for the last couple of stops.

I headed back to Caltech campus to meet Tim, before heading into the centre of Pasadena for dinner in Zono Sushi, a Japanese restaurant, and then back to Tim's apartment for the last time.

Tuesday 27th (Day 11) was my final day in California; after a quiet morning catching up on blog, followed by lunch on Caltech campus again, I got a SuperShuttle - basically a pre-booked shared taxi - from Caltech to the airport, since Tim had a meeting.

After checking in at about 3pm, I wandered over from Terminal 7, the United terminal from which I was due to depart, to the Tom Bradley International Terminal, in seach of some shops. I succeeded, finding some interesting maps which I'd been looking for, as well as a muffin and a drink. Once back in Terminal 7, I made my way through security - experiencing the back-scatter X-ray scanners for the first time - and relaxed, waiting for my flight home:

Flight UA934: 1755 Los Angeles T7 to London Heathrow T1, arr 1215 (+1)
Operated by United Airlines using a Boeing 777, seat 37B
Pushback: 1750, takeoff 1801, landing 1219, on stand 1225

My flight home lasted just over ten hours. We pushed back early, and were airborne just a few minutes after our departure time. We were served dinner, a beef brisket with mushrooms, an hour or so after takeoff, and a brunch of a bread roll, a yogurt, a banana and a Danish-style pastry about an hour before landing at 11am British time.

I tried to sleep on the plane, but just as I was getting off to sleep about five hours into the flight, we hit a solid five-minute patch of turbulence, and I was wide awake once more. I dozed for another half an hour or so, but I didn't exactly land well-rested.

Our route took us due north-east out of LA, over Las Vegas and the Rocky Mountains, crossing the Canadian border about Winnipeg, skirting the southern end of Hudson Bay, south of Greenland, hitting land once more on the western coast of Ireland about Sligo.

At this point the approach became spookily familiar: we headed east over Ireland, joining the standard eastbound track just north of the north coast of Wales, before turning south-east over the Wirral and heading towards London; from the north coast of Wales, all very similar to the usual approach from Belfast into Birmingham or London.

In spite of the prompt departure from LA, we landed a few minutes late at Heathrow, mostly due to traffic congestion on approach. We were placed in the infamous Bovingdon Stack, the holding pattern over the Hertfordshire village of Bovingdon, which is used for all flights arriving from the north west of London. We entered at 10,000 feet, and exited after five 180-degree turns - not the most pleasant of things when they're right-hand turns and you're sat one seat from the left-hand window - and headed south-west to line up for final approach to runway 09L.

On landing we taxied back to the stand from which I had departed ten days previously - gate 49 of terminal 1 - and after a few minutes embarked on the seemingly interminable walk to the terminal proper. Gate 49 is one of the stands which will form part of the first satellite building of the new Heathrow East terminal, and as such it is rather a long way from the main building so that they can fit planes all the way round it.

With no queue at immigration I breezed through and picked up my bag, and headed for the Heathrow Express:

1303 Heathrow Express, Heathrow Central to Paddington arr 1319

After a brief wait outside Paddington for a platform, we arrived on time, and I stepped off the train into an unseasonably warm 27C. Unfortunately, unlike LA, it was horribly humid, and I found myself rather sweaty in short order. After grabbing some magazines and some lunch, I headed for the tube and went back to Euston the same way I'd arrived:

Bakerloo line, Paddington to Oxford Circus
Victoria line, Oxford Circus to Euston

I arrived in Euston a few minutes too late to catch the 1343, so I waited for the 1403. Normally I avoid the xx03 departures from Euston, since they call at Rugby and deprive you of the giddy sensation of going over the junction at Rugby at 125mph; on this occasion, however, I was too shattered to care, and just wanted to get home.

1403 Euston to Coventry, arr 1502

After the familiar trip up the West Coast Main Line - fortunately event-free, unlike the previous few times, though still five or six minutes late into Coventry for no apparent reason - I grabbed a bus for the short journey to my house, and arrived home at about 15:30, having been up for nearly 24 hours.

Obviously, not wanting to go to bed at 4pm - since that would have completely ruined what little semblance of a sleeping pattern I have - I decided to go to campus, and finished my day in the office catching up on what I'd missed over the five weeks in which I'd been in Edinburgh, Northern Ireland, Guildford, and California.

All in all, a busy and enjoyable September.