RN: Today (Saturday, June 29) we had an incredibly busy day.  It started with a walk on trails near Mom’s house.  The residential area is broken up by city parks and natural preserves that have walking/biking trails that connect everything.  The vista from the top of the hill was beautiful, albeit spoiled by the SoCal haze called “smog,” but it was nice to pretend we were in the wild instead of in the middle of a bunch of houses.

After lunch, we decided to treat our poor Tesla with its 1-month layer of grime and squished bugs to a car wash that surprised us in its thoroughness- it not only went through an automated car wash, but an attendant scrubbed away all the bugs on the windshield, vacuumed the car and wiped everything down on the inside (all for $26).  It’s the cleanest it’s been in 4 years!!!

In the evening, I got treated by Felix to a special Roots Picnic: Hip-Hop is the Love of My Life at the Hollywood Bowl.  This epic show celebrated 5 years of hip-hop and featured many top hip-hop artists (see poster below).  It was a blast and I danced during the whole concert (I had to because everyone was standing)!! And no, we were not the oldest folks in the place (but came close), and, for once, Felix was in the minority 🙂

Before the concert, we were drinking wine and eating snacks when we met Maygan, who sat down at our table. We told her about our 3-month journey and that we were retired neuroscientists and she practically jumped up and hugged us because her son, Eddie, is a 16 year-old whose life-long ambition (literally- he knew he wanted to be one in preschool) is to be a neurosurgeon and he is currently in a summer enrichment program at UCLA studying neuroscience. I got her email address and sent her a bunch of links to educational resources for neuroscience, which will help her as well because she is a school teacher!

FE. Not much to add from me. The Hollywood Bowl is an amazing experience, sunset while the band was setting up was great. Smoking is prohibited but the “Doobie Brothers” were in full swing…, happy times.