Los Angeles!

Good morning, Steemit! I’m up and alert. I’m back in my routine here in Minneapolis, post vacation. Trail by Comics post was made last night announcing the winners of “Pencils”. @guthrie is back in school, telling tales of his meeting with @thomaskuntzart and shell collecting escapades on the beach. Myself, @bryan-imhoff and @artistchristian have an art shaming exchange due by midnight tonight. Life is good. I’m glad to be back in the fold! 

I wanted to break my west coast trip up in to three sections. LA, Palm Springs and Las Vegas. My previous blog “I missed you, Steemit!” gave a summary of each leg of the trip, but so much happened in each city, I thought I’d dedicate a post to all respective adventures. This was the closest thing to a vacation I’ve had in over ten years, and for a “vacation”, it was fast paced. I won’t mind reliving the day to days activities.

LA was first! Fortunately, I’d booked our flights, rental cars and AirBnB’s all before the disastrous market correction that occurred around the beginning of February. A friend of mine successful in the crypto-world once told me “…the best thing you can do is buy something you need or have really wanted for a long time.”. That’s proven to be something I never regret in regards to how I spend my STEEM rewards. 

We arrived in LA late and the time difference was already affecting @guthrie. He dozed off in the car after picking up our rental. We drove to La Cañada to the beautiful Gables [yes, as in Clark Gables] estate. I’ve developed a good relationship with the owners over the last five years. I’ve been given permission to shoot on these breath taking grounds, and doubling as a place to stay while on the west coast is the best possible money spent. 

For a “vacation”, the first few days of the trip I’d booked four paid shoots. I do enjoy shooting, and four is reasonable without getting burned out. The best part is that these particular shoots occurred on the bloodiest days of the market correction, so I immediately funneled my hard fiat in to more STEEM and EOS […I also bought my mom, @bonni more XRP at $0.60]. I hate see all that red, but if it’s going to happen, I want it to happen while I have money!

*photo credit by @vermillionfox

My first shoots were with Cherish Marie, Darla D’Ville, Erika Rodriguez and Jaclyn Cope […a prior client I’d shot with during NOIR in 2015]. I book my shoots with deposits up front, the second half collected after the shoot. Four shoots in two days meant enough money to reinvest in crypto on the dip, and to buy three one day passes to Disneyland!  

Disney was an incredible experience! We’d waken @guthrie up early and drove to Anaheim. While we sat in traffic on our way to the parking lot, we asked @guthrie to sound out the overhead sign. He slowly, phonetically pronounced “D-is-nee. DISNEYLAND?!”. A huge smile came over his face as he realized where we were. We made our way to a bakery just before the the Disneyland gates. While we ate, my friends Bert, Jenni and their daughter Emmie met us.  

The first ride we went on was The Haunted Mansion. I insisted that this was scary […I remember it from Disneyworld in Orlando, FL when I was twelve]. @guthrie is an exceptionally hipster six year old and rebuked, saying he wouldn’t be afraid. He wasn’t, but during the waltzing ghosts, he looked baffled, asking “…how did they do that?!”. I told him he was lucky, because later in the trip he’d be meeting @thomaskuntzart. If there was an authority on “….how’d they do that?!”, it’d be him.

We went to Pirates of the Caribbean next. @guthrie loved the waterfall […I hated it]. From there, we stopped at Walt Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room, followed by Storybook Land, and finally did the obligatory […terrifying] It’s a Small World. By about 1:30p.m., @guthrie was tapping out. We bought him a BB-8 balloon and made our way back to La Cañada.  

Later that night, I received a call back from @thomaskuntzart around the time we were leaving to get dinner. He and Dani were at Mimi’s Diner and invited us along. We arrived and Mills met my longtime friends and automata creators. He had an audience of adults willing to sit and attentively listen to his Five Nights At Freddy’s enthusiasm […a horror game about animatronics]. After dinner, @thomaskuntzart allowed us to come to his workshop and gave @guthrie a tour of the entire space and process in creating fully functional automata. He even explained a Pepper’s ghost, the “…how’d they do that?!” moment from The Haunted Mansion.

Our last day in LA, I took @guthrie took the Santa Monica pier. As a child born and raised in Minnesota, he’s never seen the ocean. It was an overcast day, which meant the full impact of that sight didn’t hit him until we were on the beach. He began to take in the scale, then realized the small rock-like objects in the sand were shells. He freaked out, manically picking them up, collecting them in our empty churro bag! I’ve never seen him so excited, and even after being knocked over by a wave, he was enthralled with the ocean.

We made our way to Burbank. I sat down just minutes before the Falcon Heavy launch and observed space and aeronautics history at Romancing The Bean, a small coffee shop that @vermillionfox described in great detail with her recent blog, “Romancing in Burbank”. My friend Micheline stopped by for a few minutes, just long enough to catch up. I gave her a hug, then we got on the road for Palm Springs to visit Berrit and @danielkiessler. More on that, tomorrow.

Thanks for reading. For more photography, art, travel and stories behind the work, follow me here @kommienezuspadt!