yesterday Byron drove into town from Las Vegas (by way of Phoenix and San Antonio). He waited for me to get off of work at the LampLighter restaurant. Although I’ve worked down the street (literally) for four years, I’d never been inside before. The LampLighter is another one of those quaint Los Angeles restaurants that hasn’t changed its interior design since the 1970s apparently on purpose. We didn’t eat there. I had Byron follow me to Nipa Hut for his first taste of Filipino food.
Turns out in this bad economy Filipino food is actually doing well. Nipa Hut remodelled their restaurant and opened up a Filipino mini-market next door. I couldn’t help myself and grabbed some “Conching Special Otap.” I reminded myself to come back for a bottle of Mang Thomas Sarsa later. (They sell Sweet Chili Sauce at Albertsons now)
After that we drove all the way up Topanga to Stoney Point and hiked to the top.
The entire mountain (??) was much greener than it was on my last visit five months ago. At that time all the vegetation (literally all of it) had been burned off by the recent wildfires. All the rain we received earlier this year though enabled massive green weed growth. So it was a very interesting landscape of hearty green weeds growing up through scorched dead trees all on top of orange jutting rocks.
We posed behind a rock… guess who is who….
Byron also wanted some shots by himself (jeez, how selfish!)
After taking these photos we climbed down the backside and showed Byron where the huge metrolink train accident took place last fall.
We climbed up and back over one more time and then Byron requested that he see the ocean. Whenever I have out of state guests they always want to “see the ocean”… always a very important thing. So, we drove back down Topanga Canyon until we reached the ocean at Topanga Canyon State Beach. Once on the sand Byron decided to dive into the water as an impromptu unsupervised baptism for his new life on the west coast.
Afterwards we drove the rest of the way down the PCH and parked at Pacific Palisades and walked down to the pier.
