Down the Rabbit Hole
Exploring Routes and Roots Online.
The memories snuck up on me like the tide. First, just kissing my toes, then caressing my ankles. Before I knew it, I was floating in memories. Memories of El Monte.
I took an internet road trip yesterday that was so much fun and such a great timeout that I want to share, and offer you a way to play that you may have never tried. And if you are one of those folks who are stuck in a snowdrift right now, this is a great way to beat cabin fever.
The more articles I write for this column, the more I really get how important it is to make time to just ditz around. It lowers your blood pressure, refreshes you, makes your inner kid happy. And it makes you more productive. Like night and day, work and play are two sides of the same coin. One enables the other. Sometimes, play just needs to happen, and you gotta get out of the way and let it.
The internet romp I’m gonna tell you about started after a Let’s Play! subscriber, BJ, shared a memory with me. BJ and I grew up in the same suburb of Los Angeles, and she happened to mention a restaurant I’d forgotten about in my old hometown of El Monte, California.
The name of the restaurant rang a bell, but I couldn’t remember much about it, so I looked it up online. The place was old even back in the day, but yet, it is still there today. It’s a kitschy kind of diner (you know, vinyl banquettes and rounded tables) that’s so retro it’s trendy again, and over the years it has found its ways into articles and blogs and online videos. Okay, yeah. Memory jogged, I remembered the place.
That one online search opened a whole internet rabbit hole that not only did I go down, but got blissfully lost in.
I haven’t been to El Monte in many years, and after locating the restaurant, I found myself tooling around on Google Maps in street view, seeing what old familiar roads look like now. (For anyone unfamiliar with street view, navigate on over to Google Maps and type in a place you want to explore, and double-click on a map location. If Google has photographed that place – it’s pretty likely they have – a photo will open up. Click on the photo and start touring.)
I picked a major intersection near the restaurant to look around, and holy cow, I didn’t even recognize the area. All the landmark businesses from my childhood were gone. This was a little disorienting, and also made me realize how fast places can change. But as I began exploring in street view, I saw familiar places I did remember, and got hooked on looking them up online. That led to some surprising revelations, and I found out a whole lot of stuff about my old hometown that I never knew from school or local lore. These town factoids are probably only interesting to me, but here goes:
• My town was home to a huge dance hall that had its heyday in the 1950s. Big name musicians like Tennessee Ernie Ford, Johnny Cash, Richie Valens, Chuck Barry, Little Richard, Ike and Tina Turner, Stevie Wonder and tons more played there, and during the week, the hall hosted televised professional wrestling and roller derby.
• Frank Zappa and Ray Collins wrote a doo-wop tribute song to the town that was performed by The Penguins (whose song “Earth Angel” was a chart-topper):
• Areas of my hometown were used as filming locations back in the day. Birth of a Nation and the Johnny Weismuller Tarzan films were filmed there.
• Gay’s Lion Farm, billed as the “Disneyland of the 1920s and ‘30s” was located smack dab in my hometown. This long-forgotten attraction was started by a couple of European circus performers who relocated to the town and rented out big cats to Hollywood for movies. (Leo, the roaring MGM lion, lived there.)
I was just gobsmacked to discover all of this stuff about my hometown. And I found it so blinking fascinating that I spent the better part of a day digging in and learning stuff.
I was peeling the onion. One discovery would lead to two more. And it was energizing; truly like going on a little vacation.
If you’ve never entertained yourself by taking tour of your hometown (or some other place you love) in street view, I highly recommend it. Even if just for a short break. I think you’ll find it to be a total stress reliever, and Google bought the gas, so you can drive around to your heart’s content. If your hometown doesn’t interest you, there’s plenty of places that would. The world is a fascinating place and there’s bound to be someplace you would just love to explore and learn more about.
Touring via street view has some good practical applications as well. If you are going on a trip, it’s a great way to get familiar with areas you’ll be visiting before you get there, so you can spend less time getting lost. It also ramps up the excitement and anticipation for your trip. Believe it or not, we bought our home without setting foot in our new city thanks to, in part, getting really familiar with the area in street view.
If you’re not really into maps and history isn’t your thing, I’ve got you covered. Here’s another internet rabbit hole you might like a lot better.
At Drive & Listen, you can pick a city somewhere in the world, and yep, go for your choice of a drive, a walk, or a bike ride while listening to street noise and/or your choice of music on the radio. (I find the music a bit much sometimes and prefer to just listen to street noise or turn sound off entirely.) The website lets you choose from hundreds of cities around the world. Clicking on “Take me to a random city” might land you on a motorcycle in the Philippines, at a street market in Marakesh, or on a drive up to see the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles. (My co-workers cursed me for sharing the website with them because it was so addictive and so much fun.)
I’ll leave you with something else to have some fun with:
If you’ve never been to the real Disneyland (not the lion farm), guess what? You can totally explore the park in a 360 video online. Take a walking tour, look to your right, left, up, down, and hear all the sounds in this wonderful You Tube video from 2021.
Wherever your own rabbit holes lead you this week, have fun going down them. And share them with us in the comments! Happy trails!
So now I know what you're doing when you're stuck at your computer hours on end.......I haven't used Google that way in a long time and you've inspired me to take some trips! Thanks
You may not have come across this tid-bit but the lion in the picture of the lion farm is or was at the entrance of El Monte High School. I don't know the whole story but I think it had to do with the school being built near or on the former farm property. Since my brother is so much older he went there before we moved to the northern part of El Monte. This is how I attended a different high school. As for the dance hall. I never heard about that one. Geez, I loved roller derby and would have begged to be taken if I'd known. Maybe that's where the skating rink was? I'll have to try and remember to check this out since I spent so many Saturdays at the rink. The picture of the drive-in is awesome. I remember that so well. Sadly it was torn down while I was still living in El Monte. A very sad day. There are other things I remember of El Monte that I wish were still around. But, time marches on. As for snow drifts, we don't have much for being in Wyoming. A few inches and tiny drifts of about 6 inches. Shadow is happy about it. She is out doing her zoomies first thing in the morning !!! Thanks for the memories too !!