Other things I liked about SoCal

Things I liked about SoCal, a set on Flickr.

Here are a few more pictures that didn’t make the cut but were still pretty cool. Click the thumbnails to see a description.

Will you ever move back to Southern California?

I’ve been asked that a few times during the moving process and the answer is NO!  Not any time in the foreseeable future.  I didn’t really mean to move there in the first place.  And certainly not for four years.  When I first moved there I was going through a period of debilitating depression, social anxiety, and at times paralyzing agoraphobia.  I didn’t want to move back east and we have family and family friends in the Los Angeles area so it seemed like a good place to recover.  I just didn’t expect the recovery to take as long as it did and it did but with the help of a great therapist and a lot of online support I got better.  The only problem was I was living in a place I don’t particularly care for.

But there were some things I did love about my time there so I thought I would share them before I put that part of my life to rest and start making better memories. So here are a few of them.

For a while I didn't want to have anything to do with plants but the Los Angeles Arboretum was one of the place I went for some cognitive therapy to find my love for them again. Hopefully the cool Nuxia floribunda in the center of this photo survived the recent wind storm that destroyed or damaged many of the trees there.

The California Poppy Preserve at Antelope Valley is inane. Totally insane. Even if you are some sort of orange hating weirdo there are plenty of other wild flowers blooming there. But the orange sheets of flowers as far as the eyes can see were unreal.

Charmlee County Regional Park in Malibu is like a big secret native plant garden. I went with a friend and I think we saw one or two other people the entire time. Anyone who has lived in Los Angeles knows that makes it a pretty special place.

Runyon Canyon Park is the other extreme. You will see hundreds of people (including a few celebrities). But the views of Los Angeles on a clear winter day are breathtaking.

Every year I would drive up to Malibu in March to see the Coreopsis gigantea in bloom. Definitely one of the more unusual California natives but for some reason I never expected that there would be hills covered with hundreds of them. A drive up Route One in March from Santa Monica to Oxnard is well worth the trip.

It wasn't just wildflowers and gardens that I loved. Strangely enough I really enjoyed the building sized billboards along Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. I lived right off the Sunset Strip so I even had a view of one of them from my kitchen window. Most of them are for the entertainment industry so while I normally hate billboards these seem somehow appropriate even if the scale is a bit silly. My favorite was when there would be two giant billboards for the same exact movie almost side by side.

So no I do not want to live in the Los Angeles area ever again. But rather than think of it as the place that I went when I was sick I would like to remember it as the place I got better.