A friend posted a link in the ol’ newsfeed to Google’s Location History to appraise Droid users of just how intimately your phone knows where you were last night.  A privacy concern, for some.

My first thought was: Haha, yeah! I can show my friends exactly how lost I got in Hollywood last week.

I’ve been feeling lately that to truly get to the meat of what San Diego is like, I need to juxtapose it with other places. So when Katelyn needed to make a trip to Los Angeles to pick up something she won on eBay, I happily joined her do research, and, you know, to make sure she didn’t go into some creepy millionaire’s basement and get murdered.

She went into some creepy french millionaire’s basement and did not get murdered, so afterward we went to Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles to celebrate. As you probably already heard, I scooped chicken and waffle alike with my hand shovels into my mouth bucket, and then wiped all with individually packaged moist towelettes, and felt sated and warm.

Afterwards we decided to go to the Frolic Room, which promised via Yelp to be the best dive bar in town. Based on the reviews and my limited understanding of Hollywood, I guessed it was the best simulation of a dive bar in town, with well dressed white people, new furniture, and an unusually kind bartender. Basically, the perfect spot for a San Diegan in an unfamiliar city.

First, we returned to our car to drop off unfinished chicken and waffles.  We had parked on Carlton Way, which is flanked on both sides by towering palm trees in symmetrical rows – probably a street that has shown up in a movie somewhere – the height and precision of which isn’t seen in comparably modest San D.  I think that is where we started to go wrong; we started to imagine ourselves sauntering down this aisle of palms like Californian rockstars and went absolutely the wrong way down Carlton.

Here’s our goal:

Approximate actual route:

That’s only Part One of our misadventures, and it doesn’t show you the brief moment we started to walk the wrong way down Sunset Blvd. We stopped to consult my smart phone, and exactly as I feared, some “helpful” citizen off the recently departed bus started talking to us, in a creepy old man talking to two young women kind of way. I whipped around, “We’re fine. Bye,” and kept walking, determined not to look as lost as I felt.

We made it to the Frolic Room.  It was an enjoyable approximation of a dive bar…. hipsters, new furniture, and an nice bartender. Besides realizing that LA is much bigger than SD, I’d also noticed that fewer (guy) people talk to me, though Katelyn assured me we had no lack of gawkers with long white beards reminiscent of our friend at the bus stop.

I’d also noticed that drivers in town sort of make up their own rules — running red lights, meandering around stopped cars — in a peaceful sort of way. I’d seen two cars pirouette easily around each other in a parking lot, where back home I’d have seen frustrated 5-point turns, impatient glaring, even honking.  San Diegans have a certain, anxious rigidity about traffic law, and a certain insecurity about parking situations.

We walked along the streets again, and I saw a woman with skunked hair on tall, heel-less platforms, surrounded by jackals, her entourage of sharply scruffy men. There’s a different sort of confidence in Hollywood. Maybe it’s all an act, but she seemed to know she was indefatigably interesting, stylish, that she knew where she was going…. Which, apparently, 10 blocks ago, I did not. We had planned to get just one more drink on the way back to the car, at some tavern or another, but-

Let me remind you of our goal:

Now let me show you an animation of just how lost we got in Hollywood that night: