my last day in California

Hi Henry!

How are you? I'm packed and folded and ready to go! But before Erik mails me home tomorrow, I wanted to tell you about the great time we had this weekend. I'm sure glad I got to stay a couple extra days.

Erik wouldn't tell me where we were going. He said, "It's a place everybody in the world goes, so you have to promise not to keep running off like you did when we went to Los Angeles."

I promised I would behave myself, so we walked several blocks to the bus stop and then rode for ten miles on Harbor Avenue to the other side of Orange County!



The bus looks pretty empty, but it filled up as we traveled north. By the time we finally arrived, I wondered, why would so many people be going to the same place? Then I looked up.


Disneyland! Boy, I never thought Erik would bring me here. He says his family visited last spring, so he has a pass, or he wouldn't go either.

I asked, "Why not?" and he said, "Because you pay $69 to stand in line all day."

Erik doesn't like to spend money or stand in line, but he says if you want to live in California, you have to get used to both.

We had a great time walking around. Look how many other people were there! It's amazing how one little place can draw such big crowds.

Erik likes the history of Disneyland because it matches the growth of Southern California. In 1955, Orange County was mostly agricultural. Long before the freeway was built, people would stop at Knott's Berry Farm to buy chicken dinners and pies from the farmer's wife! It became so popular that the family built a couple rides, and they created the first theme park in America! Meanwhile Walt Disney was making cartoons in Hollywood, and he wanted a place for his employees to bring their families. The population of Orange County was expected to boom, so he built Disneyland down the street from Knott's!

The area has changed a lot since. Remember Erik's friend Oree? He says when he went to Disneyland long ago, it was surrounded by orange groves. Not anymore! Orange County doesn't have room for orange trees anymore! Maybe they should change the name to Rooftop County!

There's a pretty big Mickey-o-Lantern on that rooftop. Disneyland is all decorated for Halloween right now, and even some of the rides were re-imagined with a Halloween theme! This is the Haunted Mansion. I don't know why that skeleton is dressed as Santa Claus...

Some nice teenage girls took a picture of us. They said they had homework to do after they left, and they thought I was "cute." They were talking about how expensive it is to go to the park, and I said, "Don't get Erik started on the price!"


Erik didn't want me to ride Splash Mountain because he was afraid I'd get wet. But it turns out I couldn't ride anything anyway because I'm much too short! Even when he held me up high, I still wasn't tall enough!


I'm only 10 inches high if I stand up straight!

And there was a lot of water everywhere, too! It's a good thing we didn't ride anything, or I'd come back to you looking like a wadded-up ink blot! That is if I didn't get swallowed by a whale.

Across the street from Disneyland is another park called California Adventure. Erik thought it was the perfect place to go for my last day in California because it was built to resemble a big postcard of the whole state.

There was some Halloween stuff at the new park, too.

I didn't know candy corn grew on stalks! See the pepper tree branches and palm tree above the crop? Just like the trees that grow all over Southern California!

We saw so many things that reminded me of my own adventures here. We saw mountains and tall buildings, and we saw an ocean boardwalk just as if we went to Huntington Beach again, only without the rain! And Bill the seagull was nowhere in sight.


Some of the attractions were so high up, I was kind of glad I'm not tall enough to ride them.

You should hear the roar of cars on that roller coaster! It's called California Screamin' for a reason!

As the sun started to set, Erik said we needed to be getting back to his apartment. We were both tired from walking all day--though I traveled in his pocket most of the time. I asked him to take one more picture of me by the water. You can see the "ocean" and the California sky. It was sunny and about 75 degrees, and everybody was having a good time.

It was the perfect California day.

Your friend,

Flat Stanley

this morning

Hi Henry,

Erik says it's time for me to be heading home! I think he'll feel really lonely when I'm gone, but he says he's sending me back where I'm loved by my friends.

Because the postman doesn't come around to his office until mid-afternoon, we had time this morning to go for a walk along Aliso Creek.


It's a narrow little waterway that travels toward the ocean all the way across Orange County. The Spanish explorers used to stop here for a drink, and Erik says they would cut the skin and needles off the cactus and cook the "meat" inside.


At the beginning of our walk, I noticed we weren't far from the street. Since so many people live here, there isn't very much room for nature. Erik explained Orange County isn't rural like it used to be, even though it's so far from the big city. We're in the middle of what he calls "suburban sprawl."

When we stopped beside the creek, I said, "What kind of rocks are those?" and he said, "That's cement."


It turns out that the creek doesn't follow the path it used to at all! The county engineers built a concrete channel for it to follow, and let plants grow around it. Erik says developers wanted to prevent flooding, and there's hardly a place in Southern California or any city in America that hasn't been altered by mankind.


I guess he's right, but it still made me feel bad, and then I started to notice all the trash that people had thrown into the creek.



Even though it was depressing, I tried to play, but Erik said, "Come out of there! You can't go in the water! It's polluted."


We walked another mile or so under bridges and through tunnels under the freeway. The creek isn't allowed to go on its own, and I saw so much litter. "Why would people throw their garbage on the ground in such a beautiful place?" I asked Erik. "California is so nice."

He said, "I don't know. California isn't all flowers and pretty trees."

Then I had to sit down because I started to feel really sad.


"Oh, Flat Stanley," Erik said. "It's OK. You know why? Because you don't have to do what everybody else does. When you have something to throw away, you can hold onto it and put it in a trash can where it belongs. Or you can recycle the bottles and cans so they can be made into other things later. It's not all terrible."

"Can we do that now?" I asked.

He said, "Sure."


So I found a cup someone threw on the ground beside a big old eucalyptus tree, and Erik lifted me up and we threw it away.


I felt so much better. I still don't like the way people litter all over the place. It makes me so angry! But at least I can be proud that I was a good guest when I visited California.


And guess what! When we got back to the office, just before he was about to fold me up and mail me back, Erik found out he forgot to bring any stamps! So he couldn't mail me back today!

Erik said, "Well, I guess we'll have to have one more adventure before you go home."

It made me so happy! I started to cry!

Your friend,

Flat Stanley

Way Up High

Hi Henry,

It's really windy here in California! Yesterday a sycamore tree blew down across the street from where Erik works! It was so windy this weekend in Los Angeles, I kept bending in half!

Erik and I picked up his friend Oree and drove to the top of Griffith Park, high above the big city, to explore an old observatory from the 1930s. This famous landmark has appeared in many movies including one called "Rebel Without A Cause," directed by a man from Wisconsin!


Oree has lived in LA for almost 50 years! He said it sure has changed! Even he had trouble with the wind, but he held me up for Erik to take a picture of the mountains and city behind us.


You can see all the way to the ocean on sunny days. The city is huge!


That's downtown Los Angeles to the right. Can you see all the buildings? Here's a picture of me by those same skyscrapers just a couple hours earlier, so you can see how tall they are.


Griffith Park Observatory is 10 miles away!


Of course since it was daylight, we couldn't use the telescope to see the stars. But we could explore the museum. Inside, all the planets are represented overhead, and there are giant globes of the earth, moon and sun.



I found out that Southern California is one of the most important places when it comes to studying the night skies. A hundred years ago, there were a lot less people and a lot less lights, so scientists could see through their telescopes really far!


These days California is still important to space exploration. Not only do they make jets for rockets here, but the Space Shuttle lands in the desert! Erik says when he worked in LA, he would sometimes hear the sonic boom of the shuttle coming in for a landing. He said it sounded like two big cannons going off--one boom after another.


This man Professor Albert had some interesting things to say. I sat down beside him while he explained his theories about space and time. I didn't really understand what he was talking about, so I just kept nodding, and then I started nodding off, and then Erik said, "Flat Stanley, wake up!"

I opened my eyes and said, "But I was having a wonderful dream about traveling through space!"


Later, when we were leaving, I noticed you could see more city to the north, and you could also see the Hollywood sign. I posed in front of it, but it was several miles away on a mountainside. I guess we needed a telescope!


How are you doing over there in Wisconsin? Erik says it will be time for me to come home soon. It will be sad to leave California, but I'm sort of homesick, too!

Your friend,

Flat Stanley

troublemaker

Hi Henry! Como estás? That means "How are you?" in Spanish. I learned that and many other things over the weekend because Erik took me to Los Angeles, one of the biggest cities in the world! It stretches from the Pacific Ocean all the way to the San Gabriel mountains--400 square miles of buildings, roads, cars, people and NOISE!

I learned you have to speak up in the city to compete with sirens and traffic. I also learned you have to watch out because pigeons are always nearby, ready to land on your head!


The most important thing I learned, though, was not to misbehave around Erik. Boy, he can get hopping mad! I don't know why, but I was in a silly mood. Maybe the colors and sounds made me excited. Or maybe I ate too much for breakfast!

Come to think of it, I didn't even eat breakfast! Sometimes I forget I'm only a piece of paper...

Anyway, after we left Erik's apartment, we drove on the freeway for about 50 miles, found a place to park and walked over to Chinatown, just north of downtown LA. A lot of Chinese people live there, but many others visit every day to eat lunch or shop and find a good bargain. You can buy everything in Chinatown, from groceries to goldfish.

We spent a few minutes talking to this happy gentleman. He told us that "new" Chinatown was founded by the state of California in 1938, with the help of Hollywood, to make "old" Chinatown more of a tourist attraction. Then he said if we rubbed his tummy we would have "good luck." But Erik stepped away and said, "We need to catch a bus."

Later when I asked Erik if we really needed to catch a bus, he said he was just being polite.

We headed over to Central Plaza. We saw amazing buildings and sculptures on the way, and it's true, Chinatown is just like a movie set!

We saw at least a hundred shops filled with souvenirs--paper dragons, wood-carved animals, plastic toys... You name it!

It was about this time that I had my crazy idea. "Let's play hide and seek!" I said. Before Erik could answer, I slipped between his fingers and ran! Sometimes being a thin piece of paper has its advantages!

Erik started to look for me right away. I don' t even think he counted to 10! But I wasn't hidden under the shoes.

And I wasn't behind the toys.

I wasn't hidden inside this box of ginger root!

Or behind the Banzai trees or bamboo plants!

Or inside these boxes of tea, even though they smelled so good!

I sure didn't hide in the newstand, either! I can't read Chinese!

I guess Erik is really bad at hide and seek. He got so frustrated, I could see him turning red! He asked the shopkeepers to help look for me, but some of them didn't speak English. Then one of the women listened intently and pointed in the direction of the paper lanterns.

When he found me, Erik picked me up and said, "Don't ever do that again! What would Henry and his teacher think if they knew I almost lost you in Chinatown?"

I sort of laughed, but he said he was serious. He made me take a timeout and sit and think about what I'd done.

I sat and thought all right. I thought, "Erik puts on a brave face, but the city makes him anxious!" And the day wasn't even over yet. We had many other places to go, and it was only morning!

A few minutes later we walked a couple blocks to the south, and suddenly it seemed like we entered a different country! We saw so many new people.

Olvera Street is the oldest street in Los Angeles. It's where the earliest residents came to shop and trade. Many of them were Spanish and Mexican, and their heritage is celebrated here in the way people dress, the music they play, and the language they speak.

Here is the oldest house in Los Angeles.

We went inside for a tour.

However, much of the house is outside, including the kitchen! A lot of adobe houses a long time ago had courtyards because at night, the family needed a place to cool off. Didn't they ever hear of air conditioning?

Look at all the cactus plants!


After we stepped back onto Olvera Street, I thought, "Well, Erik seems like he's in a better mood now. I bet I could get him to play hide and seek with me here! The people are so friendly." So I shouted, "Let's play!" and before he could count to "uno," I disappeared.

Now I suppose I was being a bad guest, and I should have known better by then, but I just got caught up in the moment. Our friend Erik had to try to find me all over again!

But I wasn't hidden behind the dresses.


Or behind the colorful guitars.


I wasn't standing under the sombreros!


Or behind the belts and blankets!


After a while, Erik got so angry, he cried out, "That's enough, Flat Stanley! Henry's mom is going to be terrified if I mail back an empty envelope! Where did you go?"

So I said, "Hola, Señor Erik!"

I was hanging out with the marionettes!

Erik jumped and picked me up and said, "Es usted loco?!?" which means, "Are you crazy?" in Spanish. Then he said, "You really need to behave! You're going to sit down and think about why IT'S NOT A GOOD IDEA TO RUN OFF BY YOURSELF IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BIG CITY!"

So I sat down on the stairs, and he got even madder! I don't know if I'll ever figure out why.

Well, that was half my adventure this weekend. Later we went to meet one of Erik's old friends. I'll tell you about that in another entry...

That is if I manage to stay out of trouble.

Your friend,

Flat Stanley