The map of our drive from Santa Monica Beach to our hotel, in the email receipt.

I did not travel as much during this summer as I normally do. I recently visited Los Angeles for a few days. I vividly remember the time that my wife and I, both graduate students in New York City, drove from NY City to the west coast  and back in 1984. Olympics was held in LA and our friends who lived in the area purchased tickets for Indian men’s field hockey match against Australia. India was a field hockey power house early on. Indian men’s team bagged gold for 7 times between 1928 and 1964, bagging a silver in 1960. It has been all sagging since then!

Travel in the 80’s was exciting in its own ways, with limited technologies. We became AAA members just for this, got all the maps and the TripTik travel planners. Soon, our adventurous spirit took over and we bagged the TripTiks and simply wandered to interesting places that we found in the AAA books. No cell phones, no emails, no Google Maps! We were not that adventurous with food, so we took a rice cooker with us and would cover it with a towel to avoid the motel’s fire alarm from going off! Then we had all varieties of south Indian concoctions to mix the rice and eat with. We also stopped at a lot of our friends’ homes for great meals and memories. It was from there we would call our friends back in NY City to update our progress, whether they cared or not. Calling from motels was a costly proposition for graduate students.

India lost the game against Australia. Frankly they played so poorly that we found a husband and wife in the audience to be way more entertaining than the game. Every time India made a mistake, and there were too many of those, the wife would hit the husband as if it was his mistake and would literally cry… We ended up purchasing tickets for track and field from scalpers near the Coliseum and had a lot of fun experiencing the ’84 Olympics.

Of course, now we have AAA membership in case you need your flat tire fixed (no other technology can solve this problem yet) or if you want your car towed for any reason. If you still want TripTik, it is an app away, though I don’t see a particular reason why anyone is still using it, given what all Google Maps can do.

I don’t want to bore you with all the different technologies that one uses during travel, because you all know. But, specifically, I want to touch on Uber. It is such a brilliant innovation. I resisted my usual urge to rent a car and the freedom that it gives me. Also, the fact that I had to pay $30 a day for parking in the hotels where we stayed was a deterrent. Each time I needed to get an Uber, it was a piece of cake. Because most of our travels were on weekends, the cost of each ride was ridiculously low, but most importantly, it was convenient and we were fortunate to get drivers that were courteous and cars that were nice and clean.

We are still not at a point of feeling comfortable with Airbnb, but that would be next.

We took an Uber to Venice Beach and started walking towards Santa Monica Beach, guided by Google Maps! Then hopped on yet another Uber car back to the hotel. And we paid less than the daily parking fee at the hotel and we walked almost three miles one way. That is convenience!

Portrait of Louise-Antoinette Feuardent, Jean-François Millet , 1841, The J. Paul Getty Museum

One other thing I want to mention is our visit to the Getty museum. It was fantastic. We spent most of the day there and had a fabulous time. We took a tour of a current exhibition running there called “London Calling” . All those joining the tour received a wireless headset so that we didn’t have to necessarily hang around near the guide and the guide didn’t have to necessarily shout so all of us could hear. It was fabulous. In addition, you can also get an iPhone like electronic guide (which is not that new a technology) where you can punch in the number next to an art to hear more about it. I know that many museums are installing Beacons and using location detection to eliminate the need for lazy visitors like me to have to type the code!

The Collections at the Getty are fantastic. What is even more impressive is that they allow you to take photos as long as you don’t use flash. Sometimes I wonder why would I even bother taking photos especially because these collections are made available in high resolution online already. But, old habits die hard. And I used my phone to take several photos, which all came out great. I did drain the battery on the phone by the time we left the Getty. I barely had enough to request an Uber. That was really close.

I wish that forward thinking and financially well-to-do places like the Getty would have cell phone charging stations. You should be able to hook up the phone, enjoy the art and come back to pick up your phone. But nothing like that yet.

In almost all cases, I wanted such a good photo of the art work that I did not capture the usual “metadata” that is displayed along with it. So, I spent yesterday “cataloging” my photos. I cropped and adjusted them in Google Photos (thankfully, my phone automatically uploads all photos to Google Photos) and then scanned the photo through Google Goggles on my phone, which automatically recognized over 95% of the art and sculpture and took me to either the Getty Museum page or the Tate page (London Calling art works are from the Tate), so I entered the info in the description of the photo. Yup, one would think I was wasting my time, but I was amazed by Goggles’ ability to recognize the images so quickly and so accurately.

I wish that Googles and Google Photos are integrated so that I didn’t have to do through all of this. In other words, just the same way Google photos does facial recognition, there should be a way for it to recognize other images and offer suggestions. Perhaps this will be available the next time around I travel 🙂