Daily Didactic It was an day of contrasts in our drive across southern California. We started in the serenely quiet Joshua Tree National Monument, drove four hours through the smog on the ridiculous LA Freeway, and broke out the other side on one of our favorite roads, California Highway 1. For Brian, LA is a sad testament to the damage folks can do to a very nice patch of land.After a leisurely morning, we climbed down out of Joshua Tree and drove about thirty miles southwest to the intersection with I-10. We're not sure exactly where LA proper begins, but for all practical purposes it begins 100 miles east of city center on the freeway. Of course, as we mentioned yesterday, it's smog began back in northern Arizona. We raced westward with the throng of automobiles, enjoying the unpredictability of the little "speed racers" and the wind sheer from the "big rigs" along the way. After a few hours of maximum acceleration, broken up intermittently by stop and go traffic, we hit the intersection with I-405 north. We figured if we were heading through LA we'd do the right thing and hit an art museum, in this case the Getty Museum. Perched high on hill in West LA, the Getty was an easy stop and is supposed to have cool stuff in it. It also had a two hour wait for parking at 12:00 noon on a Tuesday, so we bailed.From the full Getty parking lot, we headed west over Sunset Blvd, through Brentwood, dropping down through the town of Palisades, finally hitting the west coast. We have a funny affection for the Pacific Ocean. We can be 4000 miles from home, as we were today, but the Pacific gives us a great sense of comfort. Really, it's a little bewildering and probably short sighted. We pointed the bus north and tooled along the coast through Malibu, around Lompoc, by Santa Barbara and climbed up through the rolling coastal San Rafeal and Sierra Madre Mountains to the town of San Louis Obispo. We were there to take a look at the Madonna Inn, found in one of our Road Trip books, a pretty nutty combination of kitsch and lodging. While we make a point to avoid the topic of urinals in our didactics, we're going to have to break with tradition here. The men's room on the basement level had an urinal that was a flowing waterfall. We're betting you can find a picture on the internet. Thanks for bearing with us there. We found a burger and beverage in downtown San Louis Obispo, a very nice little town, and then backtracked through Pismo Beach to Oceano for a "known good" RV park from four years ago, and called it a luxurious night.