Weekend of Wonder: Why we chose the Mission Inn

[Read the post]

3 Likes

Have it at the Madonna Inn and I am so there… well and get me a winning lotto ticket…
That looks like a really cool place though. I may have to spend a night when I get around to visiting LA again.

2 Likes

4 Likes

I hope there’s a WoW next year. With enough time to plan maybe I can nerve myself up for it.

As it is you’re up against the big local rocket launch.

2 Likes

DSC03046 by Tobin Lathrop, on Flickr
He so loved that room.

2 Likes

So do you go down in the basement to work on your crown of wonder?

I lived in Riverside as a young’un, and I love, love, LOVE the Mission Inn. Great memories there. Later, after moving North and then moving back, I made more - mostly alcohol-tinged - memories as an adult. Still love that place.

2 Likes

It is a really good place to drink.

Some preparatory notes: A multi-year freeway expansion has made the highways a parking lot. Metro-link might be the best way to enter the city, but be prepared to walk a few blocks to the Inn. The downtown area is like a diorama of urban decay: depressing, but small. BTW - The “Taft Chair” is so incredibly huge that the president was nearly driven to tears from embarrassment when he saw it. I’ve never been impressed by their restaurants, but they’re (probably) better than the chains nearby.

Is this one of those places where they get all scoldy if you end up drunk and naked in the pool at 3:17am?

1 Like

It’s the kind of place where we will have a whole section of the hotel largely to us.

2 Likes

Today I learned that I’m “hulking,” apparently. :-/

OK, sounds grea—wait a minute…

Are you setting us up for an Agatha Christie-style Mutant Murder Mystery??

6 Likes

My family used to go down there for a week or two in the summer when I was a kid. We’d be visiting a good family friend who was the general manager, so occasionally we got to stay in the really cool rooms on the 4th floor. I adored the place. It was like my childhood idea of paradise. And I’d have a ton of fun tearing around with the family friend’s daughter (who taught me the delights of room service).

Mark, with a 3-d printed gun, in the Zoetrope collection room.

6 Likes

It really is the finest thing in Riverside. Which normally ain’t saying much, but this place is truly a wonder.

I was surprised to hear what a destination Riverside was in early California history.

1 Like

Yeah, me too. My first experiences with the place were in the 70s when my grandmother lived there, and I always thought Riverside as a whole was an irredeemable shitheap except for the Inn itself, and it was only much later that I discovered what a celebrity destination it was in the last century. (I didn’t know anything about its early history until even later than that.)

Same thing with the Salton Sea, come to think of it.

5 Likes

Rocket launch? Tell me more…

Oregon Rocketry’s annual “Fillibe’s Folly” launch in Sheridan, Oregon.