Dan and Julie visited Christine and Jamie in Los Angeles in early January to celebrate Christine's birthday. Highlights included a visit to the Getty Center museum, where Julie and Christine posed before an appropriate sculpture, "Draped Reclining Mother and Baby" by Henry Moore.
The weekend began with a stroll on and around the Santa Monica Pier, and then to a movie theater to experience the new Avatar movie in 3D.
That evening, the group toasted the birthday girl at Harvelle's Blues Club in Santa Monica, where they were entertained by a New Orleans-style jazz band called Alligator Beach.
The visit to the Getty was the following day. "We could only see a fraction of Getty Center, as it's enormous," says Dan, "and that's just one of the two Getty museums in LA. But we enjoyed both the exhibits - including a collection of drawings and sketches by Dutch artists - and the grounds themselves."
That evening, the group had a fine dinner at an Italian restaurant, La Bruschetta in the Westwood neighborhood, that has become a C&J favorite.
D&J stayed through Monday, and while Jamie worked, they and Christine visited
South Dakota the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures - a new attraction in the city, which opened in late 2021. This selfie was taken in front of
Mount Rushmore a painted backdrop used in Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest."
Outside the museum, heavy rain arrived that afternoon, part of a series of storms that caused flooding and mudslides in various parts of California during January. Some streets in the LA area were flooded that night, but fortunately, there were no such problems in C&J's neighborhood. And the skies cleared for D&J's flight back to New Jersey the next day.
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