Travel Town Museum in Griffith Park
Kristen, Jason, and Freddie spot some old trains and some old trainspotters.
This week, we went to Travel Town Museum in Griffith Park. It’s a large, open green space with old train cars you can climb into and around for free. It’s targeted to small children, but you can also bring your dogs if you, like me, diverted all of your maternal energy into an animal that will never say “I love you” back and eats birdshit if you don’t stop him. Speaking of, we brought Freddie, and he was just so happy to be there. He didn’t seem stressed around any of the kids. (Huge for him.) He did offer one low bark at two men with long hair who seemed too into the old trains, and honestly, I think he was right for that.
It’s basically just a park with a bunch of trains on it, and I love that, because my issue with parks is that sometimes, I want something that isn’t park in there. Like how Central Park has Belvedere Castle, and when you get there, you’re like, “Thank god, finally, a castle.”
I mentioned to my friend Razan that we went to Travel Town, but that I wasn’t sure what to write about it, because it was just a nice day and nothing particularly story-worthy happened. Razan, a faithful reader of this Substack, asked, “Why are you always going to weird museums?” I had to respond… “I don’t… it’s for my Substack.” And that’s when I realized the point of this Substack is extremely unclear.
The point is to use this seemingly unending work stoppage to go places or do things I wouldn’t ordinarily have much time to do. But maybe I’m happy it’s unclear, because I have this list of things I should see in LA and every week, I look at it and think, “Ugh, I can’t make myself go to the Getty this week.” Eventually, the premise will fade away and I’ll just be able to talk about cooking four-person meals for two people, and hopefully no one will care.Razan is technically right, though. I used to be someone who did go to weird museums all the time. When Jason and I got married, we wanted to travel, but we couldn’t afford to go places normal people want to travel. Instead, we set a goal of visiting five states a year, and that’s how we’d find ourselves spending a long weekend in Iowa, visiting the Bridges of Madison County without ever having seen The Bridges of Madison County. Frequently, we’d find ourselves in the breakfast rooms of Holiday Inn Expresses, talking to retirees who were also visiting all 50 states about why Fargo sucks but Boise is great.
We kept a USA travel guide in the glove compartment of our car. We’d be driving through some place like Montgomery, Alabama, and Jason would say, “I wonder what’s here,” I’d pull it out, and then suddenly we’d be at the F. Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald Museum.
That, by the way, is the weirdest museum I’ve ever visited. We got inside and were greeted by a man so old, he dabbed at the corners of his mouth to dry his drool while talking. May we all be so lucky to grow old enough to have to dab our drool. This man plunked us on a sofa and made us watch an VHS tape (with severe tracking issues) that explained F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s time in Montgomery, Alabama. It turned out the museum was just a house the couple rented for only six months! It would be like if your first ever apartment decided to make a museum about you, and you were dead, so you couldn’t stop it.
We were the only people in the museum and therefore a totally captive audience for this man who walked us from room to room, complaining about how F. Scott stole Zelda from her hometown of Montgomery and took her away “to Hahleywoood.” He was very angry about it, and it felt personal. Actually, he was old enough to have met them, so maybe it was personal. I knew a little bit about Zelda Fitzgerald, because she spent years in and out of a mental hospital in my hometown before eventually dying there in a fire. That’s the kind of thing Teenage Me found dramatic and romantic instead of a sad failure of our psychiatric healthcare system, so I’d read my way through both their books. This helped me impress a man I’d never see again who is most assuredly now dead, but who unintentionally, forever, altered my husband’s pronunciation of Hollywood. “Hahleywooood.”
We were only able to leave this museum when another unsuspecting couple wandered in. He turned his attention to them, and we rushed out like it was an escape room. As nice as it was to leave, I’m so glad we went in. I’ve never once regretted going anywhere we’ve gone, because even if it was terrible (The Museum of Jurassic Technology), at least it was a story.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Mary Oliver’s The Summer Day lately.
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
That line: “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” What a line. People use it as a call to pursue your wildest dreams, even though poem is really about stopping, being at peace, witnessing nature. I think it’s okay that it’s taken out of context, though. Both things are good. There are seasons for everything.
Anyway, it was really nice to spend a day in a park with trains everywhere, and it was nicer still to not bother reading any of the information about the trains. It was enough to know they were there.