It's ridiculously vast and amazing. I hope you enjoyed your time. After many years I finally agreed to succumb to traffic, and in the end, loved the me time.

I now live on a country-traffic island that grew out of its traffic britches too fast. Some days, when I'm trying to take a left turn into the Hospital, I yearn for smart traffic lights and even long for the Flow of 405 to the 101 to the...

Yes. And heavily populated.

And that’s just Los Angeles County. The population of the greater LA area is *obscene*. If you include San Bernardino, Orange, Riverside, and Ventura the list shrinks to: Texas, Florida, New York.

More voters than six or seven red states combined. You know, the ones MAGA overlooks that land doesn't vote.

Remember flying into LAX for the first time and couldn’t really wrap my brain around it. I come from a country with like 14 people, but still, couldn’t quite belive it

Angelina here, born and raised. I'm so excited for you, Greg! Tell us everything about your trip!

If I remember right, the Greater LA census area is roughly the same area as the country of Austria, with twice the population.

Always loved flying in at night You're flying over that immense grid, lit up from below, and half an hour later you're still flying over it

I always feel like I'm flying over Coruscant.

i still think about the steamed mussels from Jitlada in Thaitown...

How many Houston's can you fit in it?

It is. I drove across it one day for a convention. It was like driving across Texas only at ten miles an hour.

HUGE if true

It's a giant parking lot.

Yes, well, LA county is 37 cities smashed together, and those run into San Bernardino, San Diego, and Ventura counties and keep going. I live in Pasadena. It takes an hour to drive to Santa Monica and 1.5 to take the metro. I believe the population of LA county equals 20 states.

Heh, that is a very succinct and accurate impression! I have a love/hate thing with LA - I hate the sprawl but then you see the city from the Getty or walk the Santa Monica pier and you just can’t help loving that damn monstrosity of a metropolis.

Saw the Hollywood sign on the flight in though? 😂 (white blip on the mountain in the background middle of the photo; you have to zoom in, a lot)

Also, 8-lane street crossings downtown?? O_o

Surely you’re not the only one walking in LA.

I live in a lovely tree lined old neighborhood bisected by six lanes that would be a highway anywhere else. It does take some getting used to.

Gonna see if I can make it to the beach by sunset

Sunset is right around/just before 7 lately

Which beach?

Santa Monica, gonna take the E Line to the Pier bsky.app/profile/bent...

The train is 👨‍🍳 💋 So glad you did that. Hopefully you didn't have to LAX. That place is a shitshow. If you have the $ fly BURBANK.

Chez Jay - very close to the Pier - is a hoot and an institution1 www.kcrw.com/culture/show...

Yay - have fun!

Welcome to L.A.!

Not even a country boy, I grew up in the largest city in Virginia! It's just not nearly as large as LA bsky.app/profile/berf...

The first time I flew into LA from the mid-Atlantic I was astounded. You fly over city for ~20 minutes before you land. Even the New York airports are nothing like that.

Made *the exact same comment* to a friend when I landed

4700 square miles in LA county, and there are at least 6 relevant counties in So Cal. And almost nothing was there 130 years ago. It’s the best reminder I can imagine of the productivity and persistence of humans.

Los Angeles is like your Aunt Edna's ass: it goes on forever and it's just as frightening. clip.cafe/parenthood-1...

Greater LA: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater...

First time here. Mrs and I flew in to SNA and spent two days in Anaheim (Disney) back in 2022, before driving down to San Diego. Never made it into LA proper bsky.app/profile/esp1...

I guess I'm feeling homesick since I'm still reading your post but did you just say "Just time here"??

25 😆 Just not a normal thing for me to see bsky.app/profile/itsj...

Yep. Population roughly half-mil, also very spread out bsky.app/profile/knif...

The first bird I saw after arrival was... ... ::drumroll:: ... ... a rock pidgeon 😂

Which was also the first bird species I saw in London And the first one I saw in Tokyo Truly a universal bird!

da da da da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da

That’s about the size of Long Beach

I was about to say, isn't VA Beach just like 6 suburbs in a trench coat?

Hometown love!

This is how you know Olympic sprinters train in SoCak

The Last Bookstore.

The expanse, plus rush hour traffic, means a drive from one end of LA to the other takes about the same time as driving across Virginia

So many great neighborhoods in LA. I have friends that live in Los Feliz, Sherman Oaks, Pasadena (okay a different city, but still great) and Santa Monica (ditto). I really love the different character of all the different areas.

I spent a few weeks there for work a while back. I was mostly too busy to see much. One Saturday I went to the tar pits in the morning, had lunch on Wilshire Blvd, and spent the whole afternoon in the County Art Museum. That was just amazing.

Check out the ivy restaurant nearby!

VA Beach?

I grew up in a town of 900 in rural Illinois and moved to Chicago after college and felt at home instantly.

I am going to walk out from my house to probably the next pier up the coast (about an hour drive from there)

Good luck

Santa Monica (and Venice) beach absolutely live up to their vibe expectations.

2 hours from the beach...4 in traffic

Watching the sun set over the ocean is pretty cool.

And the walk signal gives you, what, 15 seconds to make it?

This seems not that unreasonable to my NYC ass.

Yup: Paris is in red

Here’s a closer view from the Griffith Observatory last week.

You're not still on the plane now are you? Are you gonna glide down over Mulholland? Don't think about the name of this song if you know it and you're still on the plane. Just don't think about it.

I really enjoy LA for about 3.5 days. Then it becomes overwhelming and I get sensory overload. But I kind of feel that about any big city.

So very much same. 4 days, max.

LA is awesome...until you hit the 405. Might as well abandon your car and walk.

I grew up there and even though my mom and stepdad moved out of state in 1989, I'm still not entirely used to urban areas that suddenly turn into endless farmland, let alone towns separated by 2-10 miles of farms. Back home, the only gap between Santa Barbara and Mexico is basically Camp Pendleton.

And Santa Barbara is like a hundred miles north of downtown, which is about as far as Columbus, Ohio is from any state border. The amount of emptiness in Ohio is staggering even before you realize that if you ignore a piece of land here, you'll definitely end up with (large) unintentional trees.

If you can, recommend the Peterson Automotive Museum www.petersen.org

Well yeah it's near the coast, otherwise it'd be inlandishly large

@dsmdexter.bsky.social check this out. Aside: I found Mr Doucette on the twitter verse. Happy to see him here. He has a healthy disdain of the police. 💪🏼✊🏼

I followed him there and here. I don't know if he brought his twitter thread on cops over here or not. I saw his thread about being in LA.

Didn't bring over the cop threads, at least not as they existed over there. Too many to keep track of, across too many varieties of crimes Now it's just quote-skeets of "Cops are great"

Flying in on a clear night with lights as far as you can see is surreal.

That was my first glimpse of LA, and it was the most science fictional place I’d ever seen. And why I decided to move there.

I did that one time and it breaks your brain.

Try flying in at night during wildfire season. Flying between ghostly black massive plumes of smoke with the hellglow of orange and yellow consuming the brush as you head towards the airport.

You should have seen it from the air after the 94 earthquake. Total blackness with pillars of fire and an occasional neighborhood lit up.

the public transit opportunities are endless…

Oddly enough NYC is about 3/5ths the size. But LA feels a LOT bigger.

LA proper, not the whole metro area. But NYC has a lot which is also not technically NYC

I wouldn’t want to have to travel between Riverdale and Far Rockaway on a regular basis.

Or Port Jefferson and Manhattan.

For customers in Irvine, it was faster for me to fly from San Jose to SNA (pre-9/11) than for my coworker in Simi Valley to go visit them. I used to take the 405 from 101 to LAX. It's 18 miles, aka six times across Manhattan, a drive that's faster than the 405 almost any time of day :-)

Having lived both places, and driven both… LA is much better to drive. I’ve been 45 minutes travelling 400 feet in NY, more than once. I can ALWAYS bail a freeway and work around. That is NOT an option in NYC.

Spread out

other than tar pits are you looking for recs? or are you set

It’s roughly the same size geographically as Delaware and has 12 times as many people. Now think about the fact that we get two senators who we have to share with San Francisco, San Diego, and the rest of the state. Also, hit Randy’s by LAX for some of the best donuts in town.

Yeah people have no idea. I’m from Chicago and have lived here almost a decade. Just massive cities.

Welcome buddy. What are you doing here?

OH SURE you wait until I've left to visit Los Angeles!!

All I'm hearing is that your weekend plans should involve coming back to LA

Or, hear me out, you extend your trip and come play cowboy

If the Mrs were here, I 100% would. But she's home taking care of the fur babies and would kill me if I made her do that longer than she already is 😂

So what you do is you get her a pet sitter and you fly her into Reno

And this is why when they moved the troops into LA in June, it was quite clear they had no understanding at all of the geography or demographics of LA City or County.

Tokyo though

Griffith Observatory at sunset is nice.

Hey one crazy guy was able to walk halfway across the city during a hot summer day. villains.fandom.com/wiki/William...

I guess I don’t think about it that much but we have someone visiting so we’re going to a bunch of places around the city and it’s absurd how much time we’ve spent in the car. Three hours today to get to a concert and back.

And apparently hard to manage from a city council perspective.

Seriously. It's like 10x as large as San Francisco by area.

This is why when trump said he was sending in ICE, many of us who know LA wondered *where* in LA? since it is huge and takes hours to cross from one end to the other.

It's me. I'm Los Angeles 😏

I realized that on my first visit out there when we flew over the San Gabriel Mountains and then the sprawl appears beneath you and it's still like another 60 or 70 miles before you land at LAX and it's just concrete and asphalt the whole way. Seems to go on forever.

It's like 13 mid-sized cities stapled together

More than that I think. The seventh largest city in California is a suburb of LA.

(There are well over 100 cities in metro LA though a few of them are quite small)

15 of the largest cities in the country are in California. If we made Los Angeles County a state it would be the 11th largest state, and even without it California would still be the 2nd largest state. LA and California are out of scale to the rest of the country.

World war 2 shook everything loose and they all rolled West until they couldn't go any further

dust bowl. They don’t really talk about where all those people ended up, but the answer was more often than not the SoCal aircraft factories.

Good point about the earlier dust bowl immigrants. My own grandfather and great-uncle moved from Michigan car factories to work on aircraft in S. Cal after the war, and later my wife's mom and two uncles did the same after graduating from MI Tech. When I was a kid it was a common story

The cowtowns in California have six digit populations :)

Fresno has more than a half million people.

I was referring to Stockton and Vacaville

There's a bunch of them - Modesto. The king of cow towns - Bakersfield - is the 47th largest city in the country.

Vaca ville => cow town Stock ton => cow town

Country boy in the big city 😃

Welcome to the city! Hope you enjoy your visit and my previous suggestions to you were helpful.

Large enough to drain the entire Owens Valley and soon the Colorado River.

Don’t tell Texas

Welcome! I'm at the beach end and the weather was gorgeous today. Greater Los Angeles has 18.6 million people, it's large, but there are some really cool things to do. Griffith Park, Santa Monica Pier, the Getty Center, shopping. Enjoy! 😀

It’s not so much a city as it is a child’s creation made from a mixture of Legos, Lincoln logs, Erector sets, Tinker toys, popsicle sticks, and lots of boogers.

The incredible charm of this image, and the apparent spite it was intended with, is part of why this place is so interesting

Welcome! It’s an interesting place. I don’t think I’d want to be anywhere else, but it’s full of problems and promise. I hope you stay long enough to see the people, not just the places.

it is the fifth largest urban area in the world.

Check out the actual Los Angeles city boundary map. Plenty of politics and history with it “dropping anchor” to encompass the port

Yes, it is. I live in NorCal and flying to LA is discombobulating. BUT … there is an unmistakable state of mind that is LA, driving a convertible down the coast. There’s nothing like it.

The whole state is large. From the Oregon border to the Mexico border it's an 18 hour drive if you hit traffic (which you will).

Wonder how many ICE are actually active there? 200 like in Chicago? They think they are going to take millions of people with just a few hundred? This is some shit plan.

So much room to build up, and they chose out.

Until the 70s into the 80s, it wasn’t really safe up build up. And by then out had become a habit.

Was talking with one of the guys I'm here to see about earthquakes just an hour ago

Yes, it is unsettling when the landscape decides to get up and walk away while you’re standing on it, but one becomes used to it.

Sitting at my desk, working from home, “whoah, that one was a decent size.” Went to look it up on USGS, “oh, only a 4.7 but… epicenter was just 10 houses down the street.”

I maintain that the most “LA” line ever uttered in a movie was from “Independence Day”: “Was that an earthquake?” “It’s not even a 4 pointer, go back to sleep.”

Definitely. My mom and I both laughed at that line, mostly because we'd actually said it or heard it so often. And you never say it with a three or five; four is the only number that makes sense. Upon investigation, it turned out that in many other places, a 4.0 is actually significant.

Because it causes more damage and physically feels more intense. Geology stuff, not just architecture and civil engineering.

Every time I visited Tokyo I would shed a single tear for what we could have had.

I think the San Andreas Fault helped them make that decision

It really is 😮‍💨

I went to the Netflix home office in LA a few weeks ago and found myself on the Strip and it was amazing how I was never more than 5 minutes away from both ridiculous hollywood rich lifestyle as well as soulcrushing poverty.