We started at Porto’s Cafe and Pastry, a legendary shop in Burbank. Nothing like this exists in our fair city. Bread, pastries and cakes as far as the eye can see. Queue tapes set up and people standing in line to order their coffee, pastry and sandwiches then to a table for delivery. Separate lines for whole cakes only! Our wait to order at the counter was only 15-20 minutes. By the time we left around noon, the lines were out the door and down the block. We are told it is like this all day on the weekends, and similar in the mornings during the week. The baked goods on offer were amazing. We had some danish, a Cubano Sandwich (as the founder/ownership family emigrated from Cuba,) an egg omelette and cheese sandwich on a croissant, and seven of their famous “potato balls,” these being a spiced ground beef center with some veggies, surrounded by a layer of mashed potato, then breaded, and deep fried. An amazing and tasty two inch diameter treat.
We then journeyed next door to the Rocket Fizz store, filled with unusual bottled soda pop and all the candies and sundry sweets from our youth - Beecham’s and Black Jack chewing gum, circus peanuts, BB Bats candies, wax lips, etc. Purchases were made.
From there we headed to Descanso Botanical Gardens, a 126acre site in the Pasadena area that was crafted from a former estate.A pleasure to find that our Nebraska Arboretum Membership was reciprocal, so no entry charge for Deb and I. Ed and Meg enjoyed themselves so much that they bought a membership for future trips, thereby recovering their entry fee. We wandered the gardens for two hours, enjoying especially the camellia gardens started by original owner E.M. Boddy and enlarged significantly by the purchase in 1942 of two large Japanese American nursery stocks form citizens forced to “relocation camps.” Boddy paid for the nursery stock, and enlarged his own collection, serving as the base for the current collection. In addition there are areas of California native plants, a grove of Coastal Live Oak trees, hundreds of years old, and a sprinkling of youngish redwoods. We saw nowhere near all of the gardens and look forward to a future visit.
Leaving the Descanso, we then headed to the Glendale-Pasadena-Burbank Airport for our final flights home. Bidding a hug filled goodbye to Ed and Meg, we passed quickly through TSA, spent an hour nursing a glass of red wine, and then boarded our Southwest flight to Las Vegas, and eventually home to Omaha. Darcy and Maria had dropped off our car at the airport earlier in the evening and sent us a photo of its location; we picked it up and got to parking lot check out at 12:06, and arrived att home by 12:25. We stumbled in, bid goodnight to Harry and Sushi, and tumbled into bed. Our trip over, we were tired, but had great memories of the friends and family we spent time with, the wonderful conversations, and all the new sights we enjoyed. We will definitely make the Southwest a standing
