I am staying at the Mission Inn, Riverside's historic downtown hotel. It has its ups and downs over the years, and right now seems rather up.
I walked to the metropolitan museum, which had a butterfly collection and a good exhibit on race and its odd cultural issues. The Riverside Museum of Art had a solid set of California-style watercolors and a good high desert plein air exhibit. The photography museum featured not two of the Ansel Adams "tree" photos, but also a brownie camera table. A Star Trek Exhibition store featured the uniform Wallace Shawn wore as a Ferengi grand nagus (incredibly small) and a very expensive price on simple souvenir t-shirts. The hotel restaurant's menu seemed a bit dreary, in a rotisserie and mash potatoes way, so I walked to a south Louisiana style soul food place where I had a roast pork filled with liberal doses of cayenne pepper. At 9 p.m. at night, a band on Main Street played solid rock instrumentals.
