Quote of the Day: “I spoke to this lady from the cruise in Long Beach today. She’s been on the ship since Sydney, and this is the first time she’s been ashore. She said everywhere else was either too hot, too cold, or too wet.”
Going through US Immigration in LA is the pits! It’s done in groups and by deck level. Firstly the crew, then disembarking passengers, then those booked on excursions. After that comes those “in transit” and continuing on from LA. Being in the cheap seats way down on deck 5, I was in Group 16, the very last group, scheduled to go through Immigration at 10.00am. That in itself was bad enough, seeing we’d been docked since before 6am, but the authorities saw fit to send just 4 officers to process 3000 people face-to-face! So it wasn’t long before they were running over an hour late.
Eventually they did send reinforcements, but by that stage everyone, including the ship’s Passenger Services people, were tearing their hair out, and getting pretty angry about things. I had a friend waiting onshore, and fortunately managed to use this excuse to sweet-talk my way into an earlier group. Even so, it was nearly 11am by the time I got off the ship.
US Immigration need to get their act together. Cruise ships come to LA all the time, so they should have enough officers to do the job quickly. After all, on the Dawn Princess, there are probably at least 2000 passengers and crew just itching to get out there and spend money. Now in the current economic climate, you’d think they’d want to get the punters to the shops a.s.a.p. Anyway, enough ranting about that…
Once ashore, I was picked up and whisked off to the Getty Villa. The original plan was to go to the Getty Museum, but in keeping with my ongoing travel disruptions, that was closed being a Monday. Maybe next time…
The Villa is in Malibu, and opened in 1968. And what does someone like J. Paul Getty do when he wants something a little different? He re-creates a first-century Roman country house, the Villa dei Papiri, which was in Herculaneum, and destroyed by the Mt Vesuvius eruption of A.D. 79. I’d seen the remains of the original villa several years ago, so found the re-creation really interesting.
The Villa houses over 1200 pieces from the Getty collection, featuring Greek, Etruscan and Roman artifacts. The thought of all this drove us first to the café, where we sat out on the terrace, and dined on chicken wraps and beer. On a beautiful summers day, this was idyllic, and we could have quite happily spent the whole afternoon there.
However, we thought we’d better do the cultural bit, and do a quick once-over of the pottery, statues, sarcophagi and jewelry, before doing a lap around the beautiful Roman gardens. All very interesting, even if the exhibits did all start to look much the same after a while… Philistines, I know!
From there, the choice was either a Korean massage, with guys walking over your back, or coffee. Being basically a conservative fellow, I opted for the coffee. We found a quiet corner café on a back street at Long Beach, and settled in for a latte and a chat. So good, and a great break from the shipboard routines. An added bonus was that because we had an early sail away, I was back on board in time for scones…
With Mike and Heather, plus the other two on our table, leaving the cruise in LA, I was faced with a new crew at dinner. All Kiwis, and they look as though they will measure up. So hopefully I won’t be looking for another table prior to Auckland. Time will tell…
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