here i am, back home in melbourne and sliding back into routine. was it all a wonderful dream? i do feel a bit like i fell down a rabbit hole and travelled through wonderland and then woke up under the same old tree. travel is so easy and fast now there’s not much time to process it all. one day you’re here, then you wake up and you’re over there. and we maintained a cracking pace for the last three weeks so its not too surprising its a bit of a dream now. so want to see what we did? let the slide night begin… dips and cocktails at the ready!

we step off the plane in los angeles. let’s pretend i was fresh faced and effortlessly chic. we grab luggage and went directly to delicious hotel and checked in to delicious room. ordered delicious breakfast. watched h.r pufnstuf and lidsville. took a delicious nap. oops… there goes day one! the next few days were spent lazily cruising the fairfax farmers market and stimulating the US economy at the beverly centre.

i was very happy to revisit shine gallery and buy a psychedelic butterfly mobile. oh, when i die i am so haunting that place.

we moved on to anaheim and did the disney thing. this time we even ventured into disney’s california adventure and got to see the world from a bug’s perspective. we also loved the world of color fountain/laser/light show. while we disney’d my boyfriend did his rock’n'roll thing at the NAMM show.

we saw new york… legoland style and now i know what lego left outside for 10 years looks like. perhaps i’m being harsh, but after disneyland legoland was like plastic hobo land. some of the attractions/rides were quite nifty and they had giant concrete spheres in their parking lot which was strange considering you can’t get lego spheres.

escape from anaheim: we tried to leave, but they cancelled our flight! santa ana airport has airplanes that aren’t capable of dealing with san francisco fog apparently, so we teamed up with fellow disgruntled passengers and made the trek to LAX in a shuttle. its a testament to how nice americans are that those travel lemons were turned into friendly, calming lemonade. a stressful situation turned into an opportunity to – as cheesy as it sounds – make some temporary friends. i like temporary friends and i liked arriving san francisco only two hours behind schedule. i also liked checking into our super friendly hotel and being greeted with cups of warm apple cider. but no rest for the wicked…

next stop alt summit conference in salt lake city! i’m going to do a whole thing about this because it is just too hard to condense it into a glib paragraph. and right now i’m only capable of glib paragraphs. here is me, relaxing at the end of the first day, wearing my favorite dress. the bigger the lapels, the more favorite.

image from modern kiddo

i was quite excited at the prospect of being in a place that had snow, but it was “warm”. i asked my driver form the airport if there was going to be snow and he said “not that i know of” like it was the middle of july and i was an insane person for asking.

image from modern kiddo

so i had to make do with a dirty old pile of ice. have you ever seen a sadder, dirtier pile of ice in your life?! lucky i was there to bring some glamour into its final days.

but then there was thrifting madness with the modern kiddo ladies alix and dottie!

alix lost her mind to a case of THRIFT MADNESS, or perhaps it was just a case for record singles. and then there was snow!

image from modern kiddo

alix, dottie, and myself cavorted in the snowflakes. FYI: snowflake cavorting in a t-shirt and cardigan will get you quite the chest cough. i speak from experience. hack, hack, cough. i lost my mind as soon as those flakes fell.

and just like that, alt was over. i was back with my little family, hangin’ in san francisco and stumbling around fisherman’s wharf with a fever. FYI 2.0: taffy will not cure a fever. drugs and sleeping do…

…and some gentle retail therapy the following day will help as well. it’s ok go towards the light. i went towards the light and found an awesome shop full of cute japanese papergoods, just as i imagine there will be when i ultimately pass away.

an extra suitcase later and we were back in the sky heading for los angeles. good bye san francisco, i love you most of all.

time for the world’s best BLT at at the world’s best eatery: mel’s diner. one lemonade and a side of coleslaw too, thanks.

a visit to the museum of neon art, and the museum of jurassic technology (not pictured).

and get a load of the weirdos we shared our flight home with! last year we unwittingly started a new tradition: stocking up on blind box toys at kidrobot to open on the flight home. its a good way of making the holiday’s end a bit less sad and it is also a good way to distract small hands during the parts of the flight were there are no ipods etc.

and we’re home again. passed (out) by immigration. phew!

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