LA Trip Day 1
Okay, I went to LA last weekend. Time to stop being lazy and make a post about it while I still remember what all happened!
So I was originally going to go to the Leverage Convention in Portland, but it was canceled. They waited so long to cancel, that some people weren't able to refund flight tickets. I was going to pick michelleann68 up at the train station, then we were going to drive down and meet Amy (from Georgia) at the airport there. But she was able to change her flights, so LA weekend was born.
I took a train up to Seattle to meet Michelle last Thursday morning, and we flew to the Burbank airport. Amy got in at a different airport a bit before, which left her enough time to get a rental car and meet us. About 15-20 minutes after we landed. Yay.
We got in about...11? at the hotel. Crashed about 1 or 2 am.
Friday
After getting breakfast, we started out to the LA Zoo. After getting distracted by Travel Town and missing the (very) tiny sign pointing toward the Zoo, we made one of many U-turns to get us back in the right direction.
(Uugh, it took over a minute to upload that pic :( )
The petting zoo was closed :(
Our first stop were the Meerkats. It was also the last stop. They were hilarious. One seriously posed for us from every angle.
And there were tons of kids in school groups. It was kinda handy because they squealed to locate the animals in the cages. They had nice identifying shirts, so we could identify them. The Reds, Blues, handprint children (who were very nicely behaved), the hat kids...etc.
And meet Judgey, who sat there and...judged everyone:
We got lost trying to find the elephants. And we were in like Elephant World or something like that. Finally found them:
At one point, Amy accidentally flung her water bottle out of her bag. We watched it roll under a fence and fall off a bridge. Oops! Peering down where it fell, a group of kids came out from under the bridge and looked up at us. The bottle had survived, so they threw it back up at us...but it hit the wire fence and fell back down. Rinse, repeat. An underhand toss finally got it back to us.
After the Zoo, it was nice to get to sit back down in the car. We picked up Amy's friend for the rest of the day. Did some driving around and eventually ended up at Grauman's Chinese Theater and wandered around looking at all the handprints. (I left my camera in the car :( )Went for lunch at Soul Daddy's, which won America's Next Great Restaurant. The prize for winning was three restaurants, and this was one of them. Michelle fell in love with their $1 mini waffles ;)
After food, we went to kill some time at It's a Wrap, which is a clothing store that sells used clothing items from TV Shows.
Next stop was the Observatory in Griffith Park. We wanted to wait until it was dark-ish. No parking. We looped and tried to find a way to avoid a mile or two walk up a hill. Settled for a very small parking space. Parallel parking...uugh. We had a nice Asian family try to assist, as they didn't want us hitting their car. Would have been nice if standing in front of our car was helpful, though.
Here's the view:
Hard to not get blurry pictures.
Inside the observatory, there was this giant pendulum that swung back and forth. Around it were little pegs, gathered in a semi circle. Apparently, this proved that the Earth rotated, as every 7-10 minutes, the swinging pendulum would knock over a peg. Umm...okay. At first, I rolled my eyes at the people gathered around waiting for a peg to be knocked over. But then we just had to stay to 'watch the miracle' or whatever. I think we were the only ones who cheered when it fell over.
There were some great views, but (see picture above), they all look like the same blurry lights. I guess there is a huge telescope that you can look at the moon? with. We got in line at about 30 minutes before the Observatory closed...the line was shut down 5 minutes later, grrr.
After dropping Amy's friend off, we drove by LACMA and the tarpits. Too dark to get good pictures of the tarpits, but we revisited them a few days later
Got to the hotel late again. 11pm seemed to be about the norm.
More later!
So I was originally going to go to the Leverage Convention in Portland, but it was canceled. They waited so long to cancel, that some people weren't able to refund flight tickets. I was going to pick michelleann68 up at the train station, then we were going to drive down and meet Amy (from Georgia) at the airport there. But she was able to change her flights, so LA weekend was born.
I took a train up to Seattle to meet Michelle last Thursday morning, and we flew to the Burbank airport. Amy got in at a different airport a bit before, which left her enough time to get a rental car and meet us. About 15-20 minutes after we landed. Yay.
We got in about...11? at the hotel. Crashed about 1 or 2 am.
Friday
After getting breakfast, we started out to the LA Zoo. After getting distracted by Travel Town and missing the (very) tiny sign pointing toward the Zoo, we made one of many U-turns to get us back in the right direction.
(Uugh, it took over a minute to upload that pic :( )
The petting zoo was closed :(
Our first stop were the Meerkats. It was also the last stop. They were hilarious. One seriously posed for us from every angle.
And there were tons of kids in school groups. It was kinda handy because they squealed to locate the animals in the cages. They had nice identifying shirts, so we could identify them. The Reds, Blues, handprint children (who were very nicely behaved), the hat kids...etc.
And meet Judgey, who sat there and...judged everyone:
We got lost trying to find the elephants. And we were in like Elephant World or something like that. Finally found them:
At one point, Amy accidentally flung her water bottle out of her bag. We watched it roll under a fence and fall off a bridge. Oops! Peering down where it fell, a group of kids came out from under the bridge and looked up at us. The bottle had survived, so they threw it back up at us...but it hit the wire fence and fell back down. Rinse, repeat. An underhand toss finally got it back to us.
After the Zoo, it was nice to get to sit back down in the car. We picked up Amy's friend for the rest of the day. Did some driving around and eventually ended up at Grauman's Chinese Theater and wandered around looking at all the handprints. (I left my camera in the car :( )Went for lunch at Soul Daddy's, which won America's Next Great Restaurant. The prize for winning was three restaurants, and this was one of them. Michelle fell in love with their $1 mini waffles ;)
After food, we went to kill some time at It's a Wrap, which is a clothing store that sells used clothing items from TV Shows.
Next stop was the Observatory in Griffith Park. We wanted to wait until it was dark-ish. No parking. We looped and tried to find a way to avoid a mile or two walk up a hill. Settled for a very small parking space. Parallel parking...uugh. We had a nice Asian family try to assist, as they didn't want us hitting their car. Would have been nice if standing in front of our car was helpful, though.
Here's the view:
Hard to not get blurry pictures.
Inside the observatory, there was this giant pendulum that swung back and forth. Around it were little pegs, gathered in a semi circle. Apparently, this proved that the Earth rotated, as every 7-10 minutes, the swinging pendulum would knock over a peg. Umm...okay. At first, I rolled my eyes at the people gathered around waiting for a peg to be knocked over. But then we just had to stay to 'watch the miracle' or whatever. I think we were the only ones who cheered when it fell over.
There were some great views, but (see picture above), they all look like the same blurry lights. I guess there is a huge telescope that you can look at the moon? with. We got in line at about 30 minutes before the Observatory closed...the line was shut down 5 minutes later, grrr.
After dropping Amy's friend off, we drove by LACMA and the tarpits. Too dark to get good pictures of the tarpits, but we revisited them a few days later
Got to the hotel late again. 11pm seemed to be about the norm.
More later!