The finale party was bankrolled by Global Cash Card’s founder Michael Purcell, an admittedly “crazy” Lost fan, and hosted by Jay and Jack, a father-and-son podcasting duo who host my favorite Lost podcast.

The party was held in the eighty-four year-old former vaudeville and motion picture palace, which recently underwent top-to-bottom restoration. In addition to screening the 153-minute finale of the series, Michael Emerson entertained the audience for over an hour with a very courteous question-and-answer session.

Pictures of the event are available in the gallery section of this website.

Although I didn’t take pictures of everywhere we went, I did manage to snap up photos of the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, which was part of Sarah and I’s tour of presidential libraries. in Yorba Linda, California. Unfortunately, at some point during the trip, the memory card got corrupted, and we lost about sixty photos.

We did however salvage the remaining photos from the trip, including those from the walking tour of downtown LA’s historic core, and of the Rose Parade floats in Pasadena.

The day after New Year’s, we took LA Conservancy‘s walking tour of the Historic Core, which I recommend that anyone in LA with a free Saturday morning to take. I posted the full set of photos that I took.  One of the highlights of the tour, which we didn’t get to see on the tour due to acess restrictions, was the LA Central Library. Thankfully, they offer their own building tour and we took that later that afternoon.

The next day, taking advantage of a daytime temperature of nearly  80°, we went to Pasadena to look at the floats from the 2010 Rose Parade. Sarah took a bunch of her own photos and videos, and I’ll post a link to that once I learn where she’s posted them.

Sorry for the delay. You can check out the full set of each photos.

Tom Moore

The Tom Moore distillery was enormous, and it just recently started letting tour groups come visit the area. This tour was my least favorite of the three distilleries we saw. First, the tour was extraordinarily long: it was three hours in length. Second, the facilities were pretty ugly. Yes, I understand that this is a booze factory, but there really was no attempt to make it look nice. Maybe I should be giving them credit for keeping it authentic, but as you can tell by the photos I took, there wasn’t a whole lot worth snapping a photo. Perhaps the best representation of the state of the distillery is the hybrid school bus and military truck that had been made on the premises. Finally, there was no tastings at the conclusion of the tour. It’s one thing to see an ugly place for three hours where bourbon (and a lot of other spirits, including brandy) is made, but please let me taste some of the stuff. Anyway, the spirits giant Sazerac took over the plant over the summer so any attempt at the folksy tradition of bourbon making seems to be gone.

Heaven Hill

This was a much different tour to visit despite the proximity. Heaven Hill produces a lot of brands of bourbon, including Evan Williams, and the tour was very different. We made it there just before closing time, and our tour consisted of wandering around the gift shop and being summoned to enter this barrell-shaped room. Unlike the Tom Moore tour, there was no long-winded tour… just two half-ounce tastings of bourbon. The Evan Williams Single Barrel but the Elijah Craig Single Barrel had aged 18 years, which took too much flavor from the barrel. Anyway, it was still a treat after touring distilleries for nearly four full hours.

Jim Beam

In the category of short and sweet, this tour consisted of a seven-minute video, detailing the long tradition of bourbon making under the Beam name, and a short tour through a restored guest house. Then we went on to the bourbon tasting. At this tasting, we had some Booker’s Single Barrel (can you detect a pattern here?) and a curiously strange berry flavored bourbon, Red Stagg. I definitely preferred the former to the latter, especially since it has that oaky flavor you really drink bourbon for. But the flavored stuff wasn’t too offensive. In fact, I kind of liked it, but I fear what will happen to bourbon if they go the way of the vodkas.