We got going at about the same time as the previous day. We were going to the La Brea Tar Pits! I remembered them from the movie Last Action Hero with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Eric remembered them from old Warner Bros cartoons.
I guess a ton of prehistoric mammals thought the pits were watering holes and went up for a drink only to find themselves stuck in horrible tar! A lot of well-preserved fossils have been found during excavation of the pits including those of: Dire wolf, giant ground sloth, mammoth, mastodon, saber toothed cat, and many others.
 |
| OH NO! Get outta there, that's tar! |
We walked around the park where the pits are located. There are a bunch of tiny pits sneaking up to the surface all around and Sarah said that even the mall where she works is on top of a tar pit and methane gas is a problem there sometimes. Eric poked some tiny tar pits with a stick. We saw a couple of excavation sites where volunteers were working on removing and cleaning the bones found in the pits. There were some cool statues of ground sloths that we took pictures with. Oh yeah! And there was a huge pet adoption fair going on so most of the park was covered in tents housing hundreds of animals from the humane society. We walked through one of the cat tents and had to restrain ourselves from adopting all the kitties and loving them to death! We decided to steer clear of the animal tents from then on for fear we wouldn’t make it out without a furry friend or two in our arms. We went to the museum to look at some furless and skinless ugly animals to get our minds off the cute kitties.
 |
| Some of the dead things were cute too |
The museum was pretty neat, lots of bones and history of LA and the tar pits. Apparently anyone can volunteer to work in the tar pits or in the lab cleaning and identifying the fossils. Sarah says that working in the tar pits is Tom’s next project and it sounds like it would be pretty fun. You could tell that the volunteers have fun by looking at some of their signs and the things they keep in their areas.
We grabbed some lunch at In n Out Burger, which is a fast food restaurant native to California. It was a pretty good burger. Their menu basically consists of a hamburger, a cheeseburger, or a double cheeseburger. It was and easy decision.
Then we headed towards Venice Beach. In an attempt to avoid paying for parking, Sarah parked in a lot a few blocks from where the main festivities of the beach are. Well, she thought it was only a few blocks and a short walk, but it ended up being much further away than she had thought. It took at least half an hour to 45 minutes to get to the area we wanted to see.
So after that invigorating hike, we were in the heart of Venice Beach, where the weirdos are. The walkway was lined with mostly souvenir shops and marijuana doctors on one side and street artists on the other side. There were surprisingly few buskers. The aroma of patchouli and pot smoke filled our nostrils as we walked along the beach and saw Muscle beach, a drum circle, and a rollerskating, guitar playing, turban wearing, middle-eastern man. There were definitely many interesting characters and even a freak show that sounded like it was mostly mutated animals. We saw some hand painted Day of the Dead skulls that we really liked, so we bought one then started the daunting walk back to the car.
 |
| 420 doctors can't be wrong! |
Sarah dropped us off at Tom’s and went back to her place so she could get some work done before having to go back to work Monday morning. We made some chicken and noodles for dinner and looked up a silent movie theater Tom had pointed out to us the day before. We thought it would be cool to go to a silent movie at an old movie theater in LA. Upon researching the theater online, we found that it only played silent movies once or twice a month. The movie that was playing this night was actually a pornographic movie from 1972 called Score. We decided to go anyway!
The movie was actually very well done and more about the art and storytelling than the sex. There was definitely plenty of sex in it though! The Director and one of the actresses were there for a Q &A session after the screening. We enjoyed it overall; it was definitely an experience.
- Virginia
No comments:
Post a Comment