This past weekend was the first time I’ve ever been to LA and I have to say that I’m quite taken aback that my passport wasn’t checked on the way in; sayonara, Sanity, see you in a few days!

While a 6 hour drive with two freshman boys may sound like the best time ever, I was quite pleased to finally arrive at our destination in Glendale in the early evening. However, while warned of Glendale’s nickname, Little Armenia, the name didn’t take residence until I saw one of my car-mate’s precious childhood photos:

The next morning, after a troublesome night’s sleep with one eye open, I begrudgingly awoke to my 4:30am alarm and slammed some oatmeal as we hopped into the car to drive to the UCLA road race held an hour away in Palmdale (interesting tidbit: Palmdale’s only claim to fame is its production of Afroman).

^Much to my surprise and demise, I realized, “Yowza, they have actual mountains here!”

However, we were not making good time since my car-mates’ Mens Bs race started at 7am and the Garmin said that we wouldn’t arrive until 6:55am. To this news, the boys unanimously agreed that if they didn’t have time to hold a proper meeting with Mr. Johnny before the 7am rollout, they weren’t going to race.

^Thankfully, it turned out to be an “and” situation rather than an “or”.

The Road Race had 6000 ft of climbing in 50 miles, reeking of pain, suffering, and a little self-pitying thrown in for good measure, but that might just be me. Worse still, all of about six Womens As came out to race, which makes my 2^nd place result sound not as awesome, especially since 1^st place’s Dani of UCDavis finished an entire 5 minutes before my chasing ‘group’ of two (myself and a UCLA girl, Lisa).

Sunday, the crit was cancelled due to street permit-loss so they replaced it with a 5-mile hill climb and street sprints. Now, you must be thinking that gives both the climbers and the sprinters their time to shine, but it sure does make us lackers of top-end on either side of the spectrum look quite bad.

Don’t worry, though. Despite being consistently 2nd place this weekend, my confidence didn’t get too disheveled as I came out of the weekend as number 1 in the West Coast Collegiate Conference. BOOOYAH! Needless to say, you should still expect to see my name on the ballot this upcoming November 6 (see previous blog entry)**

After that thing that I kinda like and sometimes do that all of my mental and physical energy goes to was over, I was able to find out what LA really has to offer:

1. Yuppies buying into the industry of “cool”*

*if you got that Almost Famous reference, you are now my new best friend.

2. OMG, CELEBS!!!! As surprising as this may sound, we don’t have many celebrities back home in good ol’ Missouri so I did what any good LA-newcomer would do – celeb-hunting in Hollywood.

^Biebs and Ronnie of Jersey Shore spotting 12 o’clock.

^Probably worth the lice. C’mon! TWO Johnny Depps for the price of one.

3. LAians are resourceful.

4. …and accepting of all peoples.

Could it get any better? A weekend full of racing topped off with a little Hollywood.

** As President of the United States of Amurrica, I promise to no longer provide federal money to that southwestern region of this great country that is Los Angeles.