Anniversary flowers in Lomita

An anniversary in Lomita is almost never celebrated in Lomita. The town is 1.9 square miles with a single ZIP, 90717 — Pacific Coast Highway through the middle, Narbonne Avenue past City Hall, the 250th Street grid around the Lomita Railroad Museum — and it is ringed by the places South Bay couples actually go. West and up the hill, the Palos Verdes Peninsula: Terranea Resort spreads across 102 oceanfront acres on Palos Verdes Drive South, built on the site of the old Marineland of the Pacific, about twenty minutes from a Lomita driveway. La Venta Inn, the 1923 hilltop house above Palos Verdes Estates, still hosts vow renewals with the whole basin laid out below it. Point Vicente, the Los Verdes course on the cliff edge, Malaga Cove and Lunada Bay are all inside the same short drive, and the South Coast Botanic Garden on Crenshaw Boulevard — twenty-odd landscaped hectares built on top of a closed landfill and diatomite mine, which is one of the more improbable and genuinely lovely facts in this part of the county — is the anniversary walk locals actually take. South, Point Fermin Lighthouse and the Korean Friendship Bell at Angels Gate look straight down the harbor. That is the map your flowers are timed against.

Hotel and restaurant timing is where an anniversary order is won or lost, and the South Bay has its own rules. Terranea is a resort, not a downtown hotel: the drive in is long, the buildings are spread over a bluff, and an arrangement left at a bell desk at four o'clock does not find a casita by six. Order for a morning or early-afternoon drop with the guest surname and the arrival date, and let the front desk hold it for check-in rather than gambling on an in-room placement you cannot confirm. The Miyako Hybrid Hotel on South Western Avenue in Torrance is the closest real hotel to Lomita — minutes up the same street as the in-town bench — and the easiest front-desk handoff on this map. The Torrance Marriott Redondo Beach at Del Amo, the DoubleTree South Bay on Hawthorne Boulevard, the Portofino Hotel and Marina and Crowne Plaza on the Redondo marina, Shade and the Westdrift in Manhattan Beach, and the Long Beach waterfront hotels all take front-desk deliveries with a guest name. For dinner rather than a room: Riviera Village on Catalina Avenue in south Redondo, the Hollywood Riviera stretch in Torrance, downtown Manhattan Beach, and the restaurants around Sartori Avenue in Old Torrance. Give us the reservation time and the restaurant will hold the arrangement at the host stand — but call ahead yourself if it is a small room, because a twelve-table place on Catalina Avenue may not have anywhere to put it.