Before my first trip out to Los Angeles, I had never been further west than the Mississippi River.
My parents lived in a number of different places, but Florida is where we landed in the end once my father left his old job and started a business.
Several of my high school friends left the state for colleges in California, but I was rejected by both UC Berkeley and UC Riverside. My best friend John was accepted into UCLA and kept urging me to visit him in the city at some point. The college campus is located in Westwood, a mere walking distance from the famed Beverly Hills. To a tourist like myself, there was no way I could make a trip out to Los Angeles, California without seeing the Hollywood Hills including Bel Air, West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and Laurel Canyon. We got a lot of cannabis on that trip from this cannabis dispensary that had just opened on Rodeo Dr. We bought pre-rolled joints, edibles, tinctures, vaporizer cartridges, and jars of flower buds. The dispensary was having a sale on high THC products, and I decided to get a jar of cannabis concentrate. Thankfully the sale offset the recreational cannabis taxes levied on the entire purchase. People don’t realize that you’re paying both California state taxes and local municipal taxes being in Beverly Hills in Los Angeles County. The taxes in West Hollywood are even higher, so I was happy to get all of my weed on that trip at marijuana stores in Beverly Hills. It was a phenomenal trip that I hope to repeat someday soon.