Eric and I love to go exploring, but sometime in the middle of our jaunt through Echo Park, Eric suggested that we might need to stick to museums for the next month or so. It is just so hot! If you don’t have any shade to hide in, it is just…brutal. But I’m still really happy we went on this swan song of a neighborhood scouting trip. I am sure I am not the first person to say this, but Echo Park reminds me a lot of the Mission District in San Francisco: vibrant, scenic, and full of people doing cool stuff.
Echo Park has a lot of gorgeous murals, like this one, that took me right back to my early 20s (where does the time go?), when I’d get off the train at 16th and Mission and tromp off to wherever I was meeting my friends. Good times.
We started off by getting lunch at Red Hill, where we made the dubious choice of sitting outside. At least we were in the shade. And I brought my giant hat!
I did not know that my eggplant sandwich was going to be this gigantic. But I am a sucker for burrata. And hand cut fries.
After that, I was definitely ready for a stroll. And for asking Eric to take my picture in front of a bunch of pretty walls.
The neighborhood lake and surrounding park were closed for renovations, which was a bummer, but at least these gorgeous flowering trees were everywhere we looked.
This is exactly what you want to see on such a hot day. Wish I could have tried them all!
Through a wire grate, I saw the old entrance to this building. It made my head sping to imagine the days when you could just walk on up the stairs to Room 210 to inquire about vacancies.
There were so many bright colors everywhere we looked. Hopefully we can come back again when it’s not so hot and the lake is open for strolling. Here’s to an early fall!
I love the giant upside down box of ice cream cones in the window. We actually had those on hand when I was a kid, and our family was big enough to use them up. It was a real treat to get one filled with home-made ice cream, even though the cones didn’t taste that great and the ice cream usually melted and soaked through the cone and into my hand before I could finish eating it. It seemed like we usually hand-cranked home-made ice cream every Sunday in the summer. We’d start with the smallest boy and work up to the strongest as the cranking got harder.
What a beautiful story! That makes me happy to think about
My grandaddy used to churn peach ice cream for us in the summers, and I was always so impatient for it to be ready! I think he enjoyed sharing that with us, all of crowding around and taking turns on his lap. 