If you go to Los Angeles as a tourist, it's not cheap. Here's a travel guide from our favoirte travel guide series, Lonely Planet, that will at the very least help you find some good bargains, especially if you find yourself forced into spending $100 a night for a hotel room. You may as well get your money's worth.

Los Angeles for Y2kEN

The new millenium, as anyone who prides himself on correctness in the face of overwhelming public sentiment, begins in the year 2001. I have a few internet friends, invisible though not imaginary, who agree with me. So while Rome burned, so to speak, a group of us showed up in Los Angeles in answer to an email invitation for a new year's party at the home of the caps-lock-impaired email legend kEN and his met-on-the-net wife Wendy.

I wanted to go to Los Angeles for the new year for many reasons. I needed to rule out LA as a potential future home. I needed to drive aimlessly around in a rental car, and stay in hotels, do something unambitious and different. I needed to hang out on a beach. I needed to put faces to email addresses. I needed to see if Hollywood held any glamour at all.

LESLIE'S OFF VISITING HER IMAGINARY FRIENDS...

Funny thing about people you know over the internet... you can't be sure they really exist until you actually see them. As I made arrangements to go to LA and this party, I began to harbor funny little doubts regarding kEN's and Wendy's existence. I had an old address and email for them, and our director friend Mike gave me another new email and address. I never heard from kEN before I left for LA but I at least had an address and phone number for when I got there. Then I thought maybe he had created an entire group of unique cyber-characters, including Mike and Wendy, and when I arrived in town, I'd show up for a party at a non-existent address in a vacant lot in the bowels of Reseda. And kEN would be cackling at a keyboard somewhere in Lesser Cucamonga. And there I'd be in Los Angeles with a rental car on new year's eve.

I arrived at the Burbank airport late, ready to wing it. There was no kEN, no Wendy at the airport. I caught a cab to the Beverly Garland Holiday Inn in Burbank. It's a nice place, but at $100 a night, it's no bargain. I guess nothing in town is a bargain on December 30th, before the Rose Bowl in nearby Pasadena. I got a good upgrade to a huge suite. I tried Mike's phone number, and kEN's. They were, according to the recorded message, disconnected numbers.

Next morning I opened the balcony window to a humid beige Angelino morning. The hotel has a coffee shop, with signs that earnestly inform you that if you don't get a smile with your breakfast (and also a homemade buttermilk biscuit), it's free. The waitress, a tad nervous, smiled at me. Hello. She kept smiling. How are you this morning? The smile never wavered. What can I bring you this morning? Still smiling. I better smile back, or she's going to hurt herself. So in LA they have to work hard to be friendly on purpose? It's some kind of policy, like at Disneyland?

I rented a little car, something called a Daiwoo. It was a pretty green car, peppy enough to handle the freeway, small enough to get pretty good mileage, tinny enough to require replacement in about 8 years. Hell, I can rule Daiwoo out for a future car purchase, but it made a great rental with air conditioning and plenty of room for my one small suitcase. It was cute as a Malibu Barbie roller skate.

I bought a map in Reseda and started hunting for kEN's house. The street address I had gotten from Mike was one of those streets that goes for miles in short pieces. As I drove looking for a house that maybe didn't exist, I continued to suspect an elaborate hoax. This was LA, after all.

WE'RE REAL, BUT WE'RE NOT SO SURE ABOUT THOSE PEOPLE ON TV

I found the house. There was a motorcycle on the lawn hitched to a trailer full of Christmas packages, and lights that made the wheels look like they were turning. A sign greeted, "I'm Dreaming of a White Trash Christmas!" It was then that I knew that kEN and Wendy were real.

They seemed surprised to see me, as though perhaps I, too, could have been an elaborate internet hoax. We visited, decorated the house, fixed food, got a tour of the garage. We ran out for wonderful Mexican take-out, including the best chiles rellenos I've ever had, especially for something like $1.25. The guests arrived. Mike, who had been emailing me with directions and addresses and phone numbers (which I didn't get until I got home) marvelled at my bad map reading skills. Mike, his son and I ate chocolate-covered graham crackers and watched CNN as the new year rolled over across Europe.

Late in the evening, Mitch and Ilene showed up. They knew kEN, Wendy, Mike and me from an internet screenwriters group, but had never met any of us in person. And there they were, showing up at new year's eve, tentatively looking around as though they were not sure what kind of people to expect. Not only were they visiting from Toronto, they were on their honeymoon, staying with Ilene's school friend, Naomi. Naomi and her husband, a furniture dealer, live in Beverly Hills not far from Rodeo Drive.

We rang in the new year with some party games, margaritas, poppers and a decidedly jaded huzzah. We simply couldn't muster the same excitement that we saw people abuzz with in Paris, London or New York City. We were not fools. WE were waiting for the REAL millenium. We thought it might be nice to have another party at kEN and Wendy's next year for the real thing. They know how to throw a very friendly party.

I stayed the night in their spare room and got together with Mitch and Ilene the next day at the Santa Monica pier. Los Angeles on New Year's Day is sort of subdued and strange... the Rose parade and football game take over the city's collective attention. Mitch, Ilene and I walked up Santa Monica Beach, to Venice beach. The city's public beaches are huge and beautiful. We were hoping to see street theater. There was a sparsely-attended puppet show... a Ricki Lake set made of a cardboard box hosted a GI Joe doll in a dress confessing to a GI Joe in a suit that he was really a man. Mitch got some coffee while Ilene and I got free tickets to a taping of Politically Incorrect.

I rented a room sight unseen near the pier at a rickety motel called the Sands. (This property was NOT, by the way, in my Lonely Planet guide. An elderly woman we talked to on the street suggested it.) The tip-off should have been a little sign that said: "Absolutely no refunds." There was not a single thing un-broken in the room, and the only clean thing was the ludicrous "Sanitized for your Protection" strip on the toilet. My consolation was that I had my little rental car and if too many frat boys puked the night away under my broken window, I could just pack up and drive up the highway and sit on the beach until sunrise.

This wasn't necessary, though the next morning when I left the motel, I drove through six dumpster-loads of empty beer bottles occupying only three dumpsters. I met Mitch and Ilene at Naomi's house in cream- and- terracotta Beverly Hills, and we went off to do the tourist thing in Hollywood. We put our hands on Sean Connery's cement hand impressions at Mann's Chinese Theater. We marvelled at the gratuitousness of the stars on the Walk of Fame. They didn't seem to be in order of time, fame, ability or job description. There's Walter Koenig! There's John Huston!

WHY IS THIS MAN SMILING?

A deranged man wearing a walkman followed us a bit too closely into Frederick of Hollywood's. We went upstairs to see the underwear museum and managed to shake him off our trail. There was Madonna's bra, Bette Davis' antebellum corset and hoop skirt from "Jezebel". And there, the prototype for a bra that had built-in rubber nipples for women who were impervious to the effects of cold weather yet longed for that unsupported fashion statement. Everywhere, there were pictures of grinning Frederick, posing with underwear models. He designed a lot of the garments himself, including the nipple look. He was dapper and mustachioed, and always smiling in the pictures genuinely happy as hell. Whereas the waitress at the coffee shop had been smiling as part of her job, Frederick was smiling BECAUSE of his job. No customer ever got a free bra because Frederick forgot to smile.

Downstairs, our stalker was trying on frilly women's shoes. Naomi couldn't quite get over it.

To shake the weirdness, we went to the Biltmore hotel and gaped at the stunning lobbies. It looks like the kind of hotel the average person can only dream of staying in. Lonely Planet doesn't list it as a hotel, but as a Deco masterpiece to go walk through. The first Academy Awards ceremonies used to be held there. Ilene picked up a pencil with the name of the hotel on it as a souvenir. We sighed and admired, wistful as could be. I later found out that a room at the Biltmore runs about $125 a night... not much more than the Holiday Inn. I could have killed myself.

STARVING IN MALIBU

That night I drove out to Malibu, thinking that if I ever did decide to lived in LA, this would be acceptable. Never mind that I could never afford it. I checked in to Casa Malibu, a gorgeous small hotel on the beach. The room was the same price as the Holiday Inn, an inequity I found astounding. It seems that no matter where you stay in LA, a room is $100, and sometimes the rooms suck, and sometimes they're heaven on earth. This place was wonderful, and the owner justifiably proud. I looked at several rooms, some with a fireplace, all of them unique, and chose a room overlooking the beach with a little balcony.

I drove up to a small Malibu shopping center on the highway, hoping to find a grocery store. I was in the mood for deli. The little shopping center had some upscale kids' clothing store, a few boutiques, a nice restaurant, and a movie house. No grocery. What DO these people do for rice pudding and hamburger? The movie was only $6. I dined on popcorn watching "The Cider House Rules."

Next morning I had muffins and juice on the beach. Bungalows on the beach level had decks where guests sat in their pajamas drinking coffee and reading newspapers. Then I went and sat on my deck in a lawn chair and baked in the sun as I read my guide book for further inspiration. Someone raked the beach. I had a bit of time to kill before I met Mitch and Ilene at CBS to see the taping of Politically Incorrect. The Venice beach ticket guy had underestimated how many out-of-town people would want to go, and they were turning away irate groups of people wearing Rose Bowl sweatshirts. We never got in.

I stayed in Burbank at yet another Holiday Inn, this one an unmistakeable twin tower off the freeway. The room cost... you guessed it... $100. The restaurant food was proudly supplied by Kraft, the coffee shop guaranteed the same rictus-like smile or your breakfast is free. There was karaoke in the empty sports bar, a carousel theme everywhere else. I longed for the seediness of Hollywood. I began to understand how the sunniness of Los Angeles required an antidote. I drove my cute Daiwoo to the airport and flew home to a land of grey skies, cold rocky beaches, and waitresses who smile only if they damn well feel like it.

Leslie Strom has a short-list of potential new home towns to consider in 2000 and just checked Los Angeles off it. It's way too easy to get lost there, and not in a quaint & adorable Northwest way. Not that she wouldn't go back to Reseda for the new year...