Conflicted by the cruise

Let me state for the record that I'm not a cruise person.

I wanted these last few days of this last family vacation together on a multi-day whitewater rafting trip, not a floating Vegas casino. I wanted to spend it in the exhilarating, churning currents of some western river, maybe the Colorado, and not the glassy plain of an ocean so named because of its purported peaceful waters.

I was outvoted in favor of the lure of way too much food, schlock entertainment and nightlife, and the confines of, well, a confining ship. Like Vegas, it was breathtaking and jaw-dropping. And if you think there's a dichotomy there, you're right.

First the expected:

• Ample bad-for-you food. Where were these things when I was 16? I can eat that way now at my aorta's peril, but the breakfast and lunch buffets had all the bad stuff you expect: bacon, sausages, corned beef hash, double bacon burgers, cheese fries with brown gravy.

• Schlock entertainment. The first's night's show was a salute to the popular music of the American South. Or, as we tend to call it, country. The costumes ran to his 'n' hers chaps with cow skin patterns. That should tell you all you need to know. The second night's show was a loose history of rock 'n' roll, complete with pompadoured Elvis impersonators and ending with the rock version of of the "Ode to Joy" chorus from Beethoven's "Symphony No. 9."
  
  "Was it just me, or were those shows really tacky?" observed my daughter with an obvious gift for understatement.
  

• Strong drinks. Despite what the brochures say, there's not much to do on a cruise ship besides drink and gamble, those of us who are non-gamblers tend to enjoy the chief advantage of drinking on a cruise: You can imbibe all night and not worry about getting behind the wheel of a car and killing someone.
  
  And a good stiff drink sure makes the shows easier to take. I usually stick with beer or wine when we go out, but my drink of choice was a Manhattan straight up one night and a margarita the next (after wine with dinner). Both were loaded with extra booze and, subsequently, so was I.

Now the unexpected:

• Unfailingly polite staff. Yeah, I'd heard cruise folks were nice, mainly because you're paying them to be and their tips are built into the cruise cost. But the pleasantness and professionalism of the cabin stewards, dining room waitstaff, cooks, and barkeeps was astounding. And I mean that in a good way.
  
  
• Diversity of passengers and staff. A cruise is a good value, particularly if you can avoid the extras that are constantly being sold to you (portraits, DVDS, duty-free booze), but it certainly isn't cheap. A four-day stay for a family of five in a comfortable but modest cabin ran us about $2,000, including meals, drinks, shore excursions, gifts, and gratuities. We could have spent much more.
  
  But this cruise wasn't just for us moderately affluent white Americans. The passengers were a mix of white, black, Hispanic, Asian, Arab, Japanese and European, just for starters. The staff, all of whom wear name tags that list their countries of origin, hailed from Bosnia, Croatia, Hungary, Romania Russia, Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines,Vietnam and Cambodia.
  
  
• A spirit of tolerance and respect. If there was an undercurrent of prejudice or racism here, I couldn't detect it. Although groups of like people tended to hang together, that seemed more due to language than anything else.
  
  And when it came to the schlock entertainment, everyone, it seems could appreciate it for what it was, especially when the performers and the seven-piece backup band were more than competent --- far too good for the material they had to work with.
  
  Folks didn't seem to care that it was bad; they were all here to have a good time for a few days and made the most of the distinctly American cruise pastimes of overeating, gambling, drinking, and partying.

A conductor with cojones

Prissy doesn't begin to describe the state of so-called serious classical music in the United States, which is why the audiences are graying or gone. As in dead.

Now along comes Gustavo Dudamel, who's been shaking things up for the past year at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and judging from what we heard and saw Tuesday night, let's hope he's begun a trend that will sweep the country: classical music played with passion, leaving room for some improvisation, too. He's warm, he speaks terrible (but improving) English, self-effacing, and not the least bit condescending.

Improvisation is something we've come to expect and demand at rock and jazz concerts for generations. And in the 19th century and before, as Dudamel duly noted, improvisation was a concert staple for the likes of Mozart, Chopin, and Lizst.

The 28-year-old Dudamel continued his revival of the practice in grand style with fellow Venezuelan musician Gabriela Montero, who riffed on the opening theme of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony for a good seven minutes after she had just wowed a crowd of 14,000 with her (and the orchestra's) rendition of Gershwin's strict reading but improvised-sounding "Rhapsody in Blue."

What was most startling was the varying ages of the audience. I was fearing my kids (who actually said they enjoyed the break from their usual musical diet of hip-hop and heavy metal) would be among the youngest.

Not only were there many kids their age, there were also twenty- and thirty-somethings, all the way up to sixty- and seventy-somethings, many with their pot (this IS California, after all) and their Newcastle Brown Ale along with the expected brie and chardonnay. And yes, the contingent of eighty- and ninetysomethings was there too, all of us taking in the timeless music of "An American in Paris" and Bernstein's "West Side Story" and "On the Town."

Sure, these are popular classics, but they're every bit as serious (as in sophisticated and complex) as the less accessible sonic spinach of a Bartok or a Mahler. If this experience is any indication of where the culture is going with this kind of music, maybe we won't have to consign the symphony orchestra to the cultural scrapheap in our lifetimes after all.

Food, glorious food, etc.

Everything in Hollywood and L.A. tends to be overhyped and, frankly, overrated. So it's always nice to find places that are off the beaten path (or even on the beaten path) that far exceed their expectations.

Here are a few that we've found over the past couple of days:

Pink's hotdogs. We hit the original on N. La Brea near Melrose. I wouldn't want to eat here every day, and given my family history of high cholesterol, I couldn't. But the dogs here are to die for, perhaps literally. I chose The Dude, named after the Los Angeles Philharmonic's new leader, Gustavo Dudamel. It was topped with fajita veggies, guacamole, and taco chips that made it look like a 19th century clipper ship.

El Paseo Inn, 11 Olvera St. in the approximate L.A. equivalent of Boston's Faneuil Hall Marketplace. We expected it to be overpriced and not very good, like many of the restaurants on the Boston tourist ratline. It didn't match the Mexican place we found just off the highway earlier in our trip, but it was more than adequate, with ample portions of fresh food that we had to take with us. Thank goodness for hotel room refrigerators and microwaves.

Le Petit Four on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood has an ecletic menu that's great for familes with teens whose tastes run to fish tacos and adults who prefer the braised lamb shanks. It was a splurge, but the food and service reminded us of what we received in Bologna, Italy, the gastromic capital of a gastronomic country.

More unexpected pleasures

Certainly the Museum of Making Music fits that bill. This was Emma's find, and we ended up spending three hours in the National Association of Music Manufacturers' monument to its industry, located in a faceless industrial park in Carlsbad, about 30 miles north of San Diego.



If you're expecting paeans to Strindberg and Ginastera, composers of 20th century "serious" music, you'll find little to enjoy here. But if you want a great short history of pop music, you'll find a concise but comprehensive story, starting with a rare recording of John Philip Sousa's band playing the "Stars and Stripes Forver" to the early jazz of Louis Armstong to the Rat Pack offerings of Sinatra to the neoclassical rock of Springsteen and the glorious excesses of Steven Tyler and beyond.

There could be more access to music clips from the various periods, but for the casual visitor with only a couple of hours to spare, the curators have done an admirable job of finding representative styles.

The best part is a room in which non-musician and musician alike can be comfortable, trying out everything from the Beamz laser instrument to a reproduction of the Gretsch Chet Atkins Hollow-Body Electric. Perhaps best of all: High-tech headphones allow you to experiment without bothering anybody else.

Unexpected...and overrated

You expect the drive north on Route 101/1 from Los Angeles to be spectacular, although the combination of mountains and sea was even more dramatic than I'd been led to believe.

You expect the San Diego Zoo to exceed even your fondest memories of Joan Embery and Johnny Carson, but a Sichuan takin? Who knew such magnificent creatures existed?

Of course, the best parts of any vacation are the unexpected pleasures, made even easier when you teenager is navigating with the GPS and locates some restaurant that only locals might have known about.

Here are a couple truly worth mentioning:

The Flying Dutchman in Morro Bay, in a down-to-earth seaside village. Superb seafood overlooking Morro Rock, a 578-foot-high volcanic plug named by Portuguese explorer Juan Cabrillo in 1542. The amusing buty tacky Web site belies some of the freshest and best seafood this side of Legal's, and about a third less expensive, too.

Casa Lupitas in Castaic, just off Interstate 5 north of Los Angeles. We filled (and I mean filled) a family of five for lunch for $44 including tax and tip. Fresh-out-of-the-fryer tortilla chips bode well for a great Mexican meal.

And one so far that's overrated:

Ghiraradelli's Soda Fountain in the Gaslamp Quarter in San Diego. The fragrance seduces you. The small portions and high prices club you over the head.

Freedom of the press belongs...

...to those who own one.

That may not be quite so true anymore, but it sure was in the day of William Randolph Hearst, whose Hearst Castle we visited on Wednesday.

Alhtough larger than the mansions of Newport, R.I., the media mogul's monument to himself and to wretched American excess is certainly a warmer and more inviting place than the mausoleums of Bellevue Avenue.

Because the estate sprawls in several buildings across a hilltop overlooking the Pacific, the better to accommodate Hearst's celebrity guests, its size doesn't overwhelm and intimidate like, say, Vanderbilt's The Breakers, which we visited earlier this year.

Although the museum's exhibits are about as honest as these sorts of things can get, including Hearst's rambling NBC commentary on why the U.S. should have stayed out of World War II, conspicuously absent is any mention of the movie purportedly based on Hearst's life that is widely regarded as one of the best of all time, "Citizen Kane."

Certainly it's in keeping with Hearst apparent edict that his papers ignore the movie because it plays way to fast and loose with the facts in telling the story of Charles Foster Kane. Hearst may have had a point.

Probably the real hero (or should I say heroine) of the Hearst Castle story is Julia Morgan, California's first licensed female architect. She suffered Hearst's many quirks and change-orders through the 28 years of construction. I'd certainly like to know more about her and the artisans and construction workers who executed Hearst's vision.

His luggage always did want to travel

We're in Santa Maria, about three hours north of Los Angeles. Paul's luggage is en route from Orlando. Or so jetBlue has told us.

When we arrived in L.A. after an uneventful flight, our luggage arrived with almost scary efficiency on the airport baggage carousel. Well, almost all of it.

After the carousel stopped and it became increasingly clear that no more suitcases were going to come down the chute, Diane inquired and learned that his bag went on a quest for the Mouse. This was easy to understand, since a flight to Orlando was leaving at about the same time ours was going to California.

We were assured it would be arriving overnight, but as of 8 a.m. PDT on on Wednesday it still wasn't here. Luckily, Paul has learned to carry a change of clothes and his toiletries in a backpack for times like these. I guess we've taught him well.

After a 45-minute wait for a rental car at Fox, we were on our way, up the Southern California coast on routes 1 and 101. The combination of mountain peaks, mist, and turquoise water quickly made the chagrin of earlier in the day a distant memory.

We stopped at Henri's Cafe in Oxnard for an early dinner, an early '60s-style diner with fresh, basic food at reasonable prices --- just what we needed after a long flight and overpriced airport food.

Finding something for everyone

It's probably our last long family vacation together, at least for a while.

Our oldest child will be off to college in four weeks, and then tuition-induced poverty will set in for at least the next six years.

We wanted to find a vacation we could all support, with a combination of relaxation, activity, history, and entertainment that two fiftysomething parents and three teenagers could enjoy.

Join as we find out whether we can strike a balance and decide whether this is something we ever want to do again.