Leaving Los Angeles for New York, London and Home

The week in Los Angeles was packed with great experiences - wonderful Hospitality Club hosts, exploring the city, it's sights, multi-ethnic neighborhoods and food, and of course, the first Gagosian gallery. I'll have to write about all that later as I had to spend the last day planning stage 2 of the trip - Hong Kong and the 4 remaining galleries at that point (Paris, Geneva, Rome, Athens).

The planning was made even more exciting, because not one, but two good HC friends announced their visits for just the few days I'll be home - Ariel (HC:arielmonaco) from Argentina and Vitaly (HC:realvitaly) from Latvia are showing great timing skills - I'll write about them if they actually make it to Dresden. I did delay my departure from Dresden for a few days for Ariel, so that cut into my flexibility at the end.

Trying to get all the flights and dates in order proved to be a lot more difficult than expected - the March 10 deadline for most galleries closing is looming. I can't afford to miss any flights or get stuck hitchhiking from now on. At one point I was staring at 4100 kilometers of planned hitchhiking, and trying to get this down to a more manageable number was a real challenge in itself. In the end it will be around 1350 km of hitching. Finally settled on a route and booked all flights a few hours ago - 562€ worth of them for stage 2. I now hope I'll never have to use a flight search engine ever again ;-)

The good thing was that I was able to do all this computer work in the awesome living room of my second Hospitality Club host Peter (HC:rotscher, more about him later) - high above the neighborhood with a great backdrop of the LA skyline. I'm a sucker for places with a view:


In an hour I'll hit the road again - buses to LAX airport, a night flight to NYC, arriving at Newark at 6 in the morning tomorrow, Feb 15. Then going to all three galleries in Manhattan during the morning before heading back to the airport for another night flight to London, again arriving at 6 (Heathrow). Yet another 2 galleries there as I cross the city from Heathrow to the other side to go up to Stansted - haven't decided yet whether I'll hitchhike or take a bus so I won't miss the flight home to Germany in the evening (Leipzig, then hitching to Dresden just in time for Viola's birthday).