A Laid-Back Look : Motor Coach Tour Takes the High-Life Road to Christmas Light Shows

Frustrated sightseers looking for the season’s most colorful displays of holiday lights often end up seeing red.

That’s the color of the unbroken string of taillights ahead of them as carloads of spectators creep along gridlocked residential streets renamed Candy Cane Lane and Elf Avenue.

But not everybody fumes over the traffic jams that have become holiday traditions of sorts in scattered neighborhoods around Los Angeles. The lucky ones reach for crackers and cheese and another glass of fume .

They are the ones who see the season in style from luxurious motor coaches that travel to decorated pockets of Pasadena, Altadena, San Marino and Woodland Hills.

For the past two weeks, a Newport Beach bus operator has offered the holiday tours to anyone willing to spend $550 to treat friends to a ride up and down streets lined with rows of plywood little drummer boys and cutout Santa Clauses.

Those aboard Ralph Simpson’s $375,000 kitchen- and bar-equipped Pacific Motorcoach bus Tuesday night for a day-after-Christmas peek at Christmas came away with a new appreciation for mass transit. And the neighborhoods’ brightly lit decorations weren’t bad, either.

“Look, there’s a dark house,” joked passenger Bruce Ludwig of Hancock Park. “Let’s stop there and throw Brie at them. They’re ruining our night.”

Hancock Park residents Joyce and Lockwood Haight invited Ludwig and 13 other friends along for the tour. At first, the idea left a few of the guests cold.

“I wasn’t excited at first about spending three hours on a bus,” said Patricia Frandson of Van Nuys. “When I think of buses, I think of the thing I rode to school every day when I was growing up in Toledo.”

But the passengers ended up impressed by what they saw. “I thought they were nuts at first to invite us to a bus . . . but I’m glad I came,” said Bill Baird of Hancock Park.

“Did I have to twist any arms? Only 14,” Joyce Haight said with a laugh as driver David Foesch maneuvered the 40-foot bus down Medford Road, a street in the Upper Hastings Ranch area of Pasadena fully decorated with a Christmas angel theme. The 44-block neighborhood has been decorated with street-by-street themes for 34 years.

“If anybody asks, we’ll tell them we’re Japanese tourists and we’re going to buy their neighborhood,” shouted Ludwig from the rear of the bus. “They change their decoration theme every year here. Why don’t we buy last year’s stuff to use in our neighborhood next year?”

The passengers frequently rushed to the windows when the bus passed by particularly spectacular lights during the tour. The route included the 10,000-bulb-decorated Bailian House in Pasadena, half a mile of lighted cedar trees along Santa Rosa Avenue and similarly lighted St. Albans Road in San Marino.

One homeowner in the Upper Hastings Ranch neighborhood, dressed as Santa Claus, flagged down the luxury coach in front of his house and offered candy to the passengers. Other residents waved from their front porches.

Wade Wright, coordinator of this year’s Christmas decorations for the Upper Hastings Ranch Assn., said about 900 of his community’s 1,100 houses are lit this month. He said most of his neighbors welcome tour buses--except for a few living on Denair Street.

“They’ve objected to the bus fumes,” Wright said Wednesday. “Maybe next year we’ll make that a walking area.”

Bus riders are likely to consider that a step in the wrong direction.