Hola from LA! We flew into LAX yesterday and are visiting our dear friend, Debbie Yates, in Culver City, California, en route to Hawaii for our 30th anniversary.

It’s been a beautiful day here in Southern California: clear skies and about 72° outside, so we took advantage of the weather and the fact that today is a low-traffic Sunday and drove up the Santa Monica Freeway to the Getty Center, an art museum and garden complex founded by J. Paul Getty.

The Getty Center is on top of a hill, overlooking Los Angeles. To get there, you park at the base of the hill and take a tram up. Here’s a picture from the tram with the Center on top on the right.

It’s an amazing complex of buildings: there are five separate art galleries, connected by walkways.

Here we are exiting the tram on our way up to the galleries. There was an exhibit of Gustav Klimt’s line drawings that were the studies for his paintings.

I was familiar with Klimt’s paintings, but had no idea he had done such fantastic drawings. No photos were allowed inside the Klimt exhibit, but here’s my favorite drawing of his that I downloaded from the Getty Center’s website. It’s incredibly difficult to draw the human figure using only outlines, without shading or highlights, but Klimt was a master at letting the observer fill in the details in his or her mind’s eye:

We really enjoyed just walking around the complex and looking at the gardens and views of LA.

Here’s another photo of Debbie and Dale:

And one of me and Dale:

Inside the other exhibition halls were a few Impressionist paintings and a couple Dutch Masters, as well as a number of earlier Italian paintings. This one looked familiar, but we couldn’t place it.

As we were leaving, we looked back down on the Santa Monica Freeway, “the road more traveled.”

And on the way back to Debbie’s house, we drove down Sunset Drive to the beach, then stopped to walk along the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica.

It’s been fun visiting with Deb and catching up on old times.