Super September Saturday

How is September already over?  Best month of the year - best people born in this month, and it's dunzo.  One quarter left and we'll be staring 2012 right in the face.  Seriously - where does time go?

Solid month for me.  Let's look back.  My parents visited over Labor Day.  Good weekends continued.

The next weekend I went to an improv show.  Becca came up from HB and stayed with me.  We went out to dinner at midnight.  And miraculously I woke up at 6am the next morning to volunteer with my ward, handing out shoes and backpacks to families who'd slept overnight to be first in line to get these items for their kids.  I had a blast and even managed to function while speaking Spanish.  

As soon as my volunteer shift was over, I raced downtown to hop on the Esotouric bus.  MCB and I had booked this tour into the secret heart of LA months ago, so I went.  Tour title: Hotel Horrors and Main Street Vice.  A fascinating view of historic hotels.  Downtown LA is kinda growing on me.

One of the stops - the old Stowell Hotel, now the El Dorado Lofts - is where Charlie Chapman lived for a bit.  And apparently these tiles are worth $5-10k each.

The Alexandria Hotel was apparently the 'it' place, until the Biltmore hotel opened.

The gorgeous ballroom because a boxing gym later on.

We had a stop at Clifton's Cafeteria for some refreshment. It's closed for refurbishment at the moment.  Guess I can't make a return trip anytime soon.

I heard more stories about ghost-occupied areas of hotels, honkey tonks, a Count Dracula Society, serial killers (like this guy) and burlesque stars of their day.  Pretty interesting stuff.  It's amazing what you can find when you dig into a little history.  Estouric was cool - I'd recommend it to someone who's got an afternoon to kill.

Next up = Time to race to the USC-Utah game.  I parked my car somewhere downtown and took my first public LA bus.  I ran to will call, grabbed the ticket that Jeff had left for me, and ran up the bleachers to watch Utah kinda fall apart.  Follow that with some Thai in Hollywood, and you've got an excellent, but very long Saturday.