Old Home Day at UCLA

That's right. Chocolate ice cream. Of course, he threw it all up later. I hate traffic. We need a new label, though. "Shots of Iain with Chocolate."

So we took Iain to UCLA. We needed an outing to the city because we had a dinner date in Silverlake. I was unaware of the ongoing, expanded, apocalyptic construction on the 405. Yes, I know. I'm a fool. But I never, ever used the 405 as a student so how was I to know that's where time goes to die?

Anyway, it took us 2 hours to reach UCLA.* In the heat, the traffic is just maddening. Finally, we hopped off at Wilshire and reached campus. Iain needed placating, so we bought him a chocolate ice cream at the coffee shop in the Student Center.

Then it was time to shop. My current UCLA gear (T-shirts, I mean) is in tatters. With one exception, everything has stains, holes, and fabric thin enough to read the OED.

Iain, meanwhile, has no UCLA gear. Zip. The solution: two shirts for him, three for me and a nice sweatshirt, too. For me. While I weighed the relative merits of block letters versus cursive and color versus grey, Iain and The Dad identified all the Lego merchandise in the bookstore. We went home with new clothes plus some mini-figs and a Lego/Star Wars book.

But then.

We needed to get to Silverlake. I'm never exactly sure where Silverlake is. It was newly hot when we lived in LA and since I'm the original Little Old Lady from Pasadena, I never went there. Turns out it's useful to know where something is in order to drive there. Oops.**

An hour and 15 minutes later, Iain was throwing up all his chocolate ice cream into a lovely little Legoland tote bag. Good job, kid! No mess. At all. And he's ready for college, too. Boot and rally. Ten minutes after being sick he walked into a restaurant (washed his hands, rinsed his mouth) and ordered scrambled eggs, bacon, and pancakes. What a champ.

The drive home seemed so fast, of course.

That was Wednesday. Since then, we've learned that Iain really isn't a long-trip with traffic and enclosed spaces and bumps kind of kid. He had another episode of motion sickness on the plane today. I almost did, too. Five minutes of wild swooping and bumping will do that.





*For Angelenos: We took the 5 to the 605 to the 105 to the 405 to Wilshire. I think we probably would have been better off on the 5 to the 10, but who can tell? If traffic is really a form of karmic balancing, we'd have been in it either way.
** For Angelenos: We took Sunset to Beverly Glen to Ventura to Woodman to the 105 to the 134 toward the 5. When that was a total parking lot, we jumped off at the cemetery and took the road through the Zoo past the Autry Center to the restaurant. The GPS was telling us to get on the damn 5 until we drove right up to the restaurant.