TripAdvisor and Griffith Park, Sitting in a Tree

The mondo travel site adds our wild and vast space to a top parks list.

If you've ever watched even the littlest bit of "Sesame Street" -- and that should practically be some kind of law, for both adults and kids -- then you've probably gotten the "one of these things is not like the other" song in your head.

For days. And days. And days at a time.

Weeks.

And if there ever was a place that could claim such a ditty as its theme song, it is Los Angeles. We're practically the capital of one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other-ism, because we tend to go our own lavishly loopy, do-our-own-thang way on most matters.

Convention be damned.

To whit: Griffith Park, which was just picked to sit at #14 on TripAdvisor's Nation's Top Parks list, a list that hails from the Travelers' Choice Attraction awards.

Voters surely picked it for numerous reasons, including its rambling hills, Griffith Observatory, the Hollywood Sign, the carousel, the horseback riding and the old trains and the many, many hiking trails. Plus the other 589 great points found around one of the country's largest urban parks.

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But can we all pause to admire LA's vast bucolic space, its other Los Feliz-adjacent lung, for its not-like-the-other-ness? While many of the fine parks on the list are highly manicured and oh-so-traditional, there's a rustic oaky spirit to Griffith Park. It's a West-is-the-best-ian feel that other green spaces, gorgeous though they might be, don't quite possess.

Yeah, we're experiencing some puffed-up park pride, but that's okay. Any great metropolitan needs its great play place, its carousel and its telescopes and its quiet paths. Of course Griffith would make a hoity-toity top parks list. It's a fine example of how going your own way, on a large scale, can really, really work.

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