Somehow winter missed us here in Southern California, and this was the afternoon skies yesterday atop Hilltop Hill in Signal Hill, a city within Long Beach. We’d just had rain the night before and so the air felt really crisp and clean.
If you haven’t noticed, after years of the same theme, I finally updated it yesterday. Figured with the new year, a little change wouldn’t hurt 🙂
My friend Pam introduced me to Hilltop Hill in the city of Signal Hill years ago where we sat on one of the cement benches and looked out on the cities of Long Beach to the south and Los Angeles to the north. I had just left the South Bay after more than 10 years of being a beach girl and two years in to my life as a Long Beach resident, I still hadn’t gotten around to getting used to my new digs, and still did my groceries and shopping in the South Bay on my way home from my office.
Signal Hill is located within the city of Long Beach, and is one of the cities referenced in There Will Be Blood, the movie starring Daniel Day-Lewis. It used to be called Porcupine Hill because of all the oil derricks that peppered the area in the 1920’s that from the distance, it looked like porcupine quills. It was also the perfect place for a real estate boom at that time.
These days, Signal Hill, though no longer looking like Porcupine Hill, still has a few derricks, sometimes right in one’s backyard, with beautiful houses everywhere and a quaint supportive community in the middle of a much bigger city. But there’s a beautiful park on top of the hill and my memories of this hill will always be tied to Pam. The hill is appropriately called Hilltop Hill.
So this morning, I headed over to the Hilltop Park to take a few minutes to myself and just enjoy the view. At the entrance of the park is this walkway with a beautiful saying.
And having discovered that my iPhone does have the panorama feature, I took this beautiful shot of the city of Los Angeles.
There’s a major movie premiere happening tonight right in the middle of that shot – which is Hollywood, I think, with downtown Los Angeles to the right on the horizon and Century City and West Los Angeles on the left of the horizon. The ocean and the port of Long Beach would be to the left of the shot itself
Morrighan's Muse 