Burbank, Day Three

We woke up at the entirely reasonable hour of 6:30. After puttering around a bit in the hotel room, we went to the Tally Rand restaurant. It's a Burbank landmark and it's been around for 50 years. Our combined ages were the average age of the patrons and waitstaff. Everything, but everything comes with avocado, which I can totally get behind. We took off to the Rancho Adjacent section of Burbank to see our friend Janice. We met her at her huge swanky new house that she is renovating with her sweetie, our co-worker Mike. It was literally 3 times the size of the houses we've looked at, with a gorgeous pool and spacious backyard. We look forward to many many parties in that backyard. She took us on a quick tour of her neighborhood and the neighboring Equestrian district, where the zoning laws allow people to keep horses in their backyard. Arlo was enchanted.

We took off for an appointment to view an apartment across the street from the Warner Ranch. It was a pretty big 3 bedroom, 2 bath, with a small galley kitchen and combined living room/dining room. It would be great for a year or two -- Evan could bike to work, I could walk to the Ranch and the local school to drop off the kids. We had a forgettable lunch at a chain and my darling, darling husband took the kids for a swim so I could catch a few winks.

The apartment house on Hollywood Way

Picture of the Ranch taken from the same place as the apartment building

Adorable storybook cottages across the street

Refreshed, we drove over the the Robert Louis Stevenson Elementary School. We were pleased to discover that they weren't on spring break! We chatted for a while with the adults on the playground who were running the after school program, through the Boys and Girls Club. There were kids everywhere, shuttling between the playground, computer lab, and a classroom. We ran into the principal who gave us a lovely welcome and the newsletter. It's the smallest elementary school in Burbank and has about 15% ESL students, which made Oscar feel right at home. (Our current school is the ESL school for our district.)

The layout of the school had one long narrow building which had offices and classrooms (only one deep) flanked by the auditorium and gym at either end. It had a huge back area, with fields and play areas and freestanding classrooms (portables). Oscar got a kick out of their "cloakrooms," which were a line of hooks on the outside of the classroom.

We left the school feeling very relieved that even if Oscar and Arlo don't attend this school, they will go to a similar one, and they seemed pretty happy about it.

We drove down to the Magnolia Park shopping area. It reminded us a lot of a less swanky downtown Montclair or Fremont. Plenty of empty storefronts, but very few chain stores. Lots of moms-and-pops. We stopped in a collector shop, lots of Godzilla statues and dusty action figures. Next door was a Jellybean shop (thankfully closed) and a pet shop, where I fell in love with a golden lab puppy and Oscar fell in love with one of those tiny fluffly dust mop puppies. We also learned that gerbils are in fact illegal in California! I hope the Spanglers are enjoying their trial period and want to take them permanently.

We passed plenty of vintage shops and antique places and found a right-out-of-central-casting red sauce Italian joint, which was, well, adequate. I kept having a hard time sussing out the waiter's accent. I think he was Mexican but speaking in a put-on Italian accent. But the kids' bellies got full and Evan and I had a lovely quiet dinner after the kids shoveled theirs in and were pacified by various electronics.

Came back to the hotel, wrangled everyone into bed, and the kids were asleep in a record-setting 20 minutes. Evan read, I wrote last night's blog entry and packed up our stuff.

This morning we got up, fueled up with some hotel breakfast noshes, and we are currently on the 5 making our way down to Legoland, experiencing plenty of that famous California traffic. More later!