Skip to main content

California: Long Beach

No more California after this, I promise!  We'll be back to normal life again.  This is just a scattershot tour of the highlights from Long Beach. in no particular order.  If nothing else, you get a few more cute photos of Toby to look at.

Long Beach is part of the greater Los Angeles sprawl, and while it might not be your first choice for a holiday destination, it has a pretty harbour area and a few good attractions (the Queen Mary of course being one).  We spent several days just pottering around and enjoying time in the sunshine.

Outside the Convention Center
Strolling along the boardwalk
The harbour and downtown.
An inoperative lighthouse had a pleasant little park around it...
...perfect for fun and games!
Shhh, don't tell him you can put money in it!
We drove to Huntingdon Beach one evening, where we were appalled to find that most of the car parks wanted $15 from us!  Finally we found a meter to put a few quarters in, and were rewarded with a nice sunset.
Sun setting over the palm trees at Huntingdon Beach
The beach baby look: sunglasses and dummy!
On Sunday we met up with some friends who live close by in San Pedro.  We joined them at their very friendly church, where we were greeted warmly and Toby, to our surprise, made a beeline for the nursery (probably thinking, "Finally!  Some different toys!")  After church we headed for a local park, where the adults enjoyed a cookout and the kids enjoyed the playground.  Their little girl is almost exactly the same age as Toby, and they seemed to get on well in that strange toddler fashion of mostly ignoring each other.


Being locals, they were able to give us a few recommendations, one of which was for the Frosted Cupcakery in the Belmont Shore area.  Graham and I went citrussy with lemon and key lime cupcakes, and we treated Toby to a chocolate "hi-hat" - kind of a mini cake and frosting sandwich.

Yummy!
Belmont Shore has some pretty streets, too, and so many of the homes had flowering bushes outside.
 Another recommendation was the Aquarium of the Pacific.  It's a great place, but let me further recommend that you don't try and drag your very cranky toddler around it.  Having said that, the penguins and rays were interesting enough to pull him out of cranky mode for a while, and we managed a pretty good tour before we hit complete meltdown.  We were even honoured with a great view of the octopus, who normally hides in her cave all day.  It was obvious something special was happening when all the employees were calling each other to come have a look!

Graham and Toby by the ray tank
You can even touch them if you want!
Look at those suckers!
One of the tanks was floor to ceiling and had some great big fish.
Anything with a steering wheel is always a hit.
Fast asleep on the bus back to the Queen Mary.
 On our final evening in Long Beach we were out looking for a place to eat, and stumbled across Kavikas.  The first attraction was a patio overlooking the marina, which we inexplicably had completely to ourselves.  The second was the sign saying, "Free kids meals".  This, we thought, has got to be worth a try.  We were not wrong.  Toby's food came on a plate almost as big as he is!  He thought he was in chip heaven, and tucked in with gusto.  Meanwhile we were wondering how big the adult portions were, if that was a child-size one!  Fortunately they were quite manageable and just as delicious.  Isn't it great when your lack of planning works out that well?

Is it bad that Toby is a pro at dipping things into ketchup?
Yummy!
Our trip home was mostly uneventful, at least until we picked up our car from the remote parking and somehow managed to set off down the wrong road.  What was worse was that it took us a good ten minutes to realise it!  Suffice to say that Hwy 183 - I820 - I35W is not the direct route home from DFW airport, and our Texas friends can laugh as much as they want, but I bet they've done something similar at least once!
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hiya Martha, so cool to see your photo's, it looks like your having a wonderful time & Toby looks full of fun. Many Blessings, love Su, (old cafe staff member.)
25 August 2012 at 12:39
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mr White Watson of Bakewell

Once upon a time, back in 1795 or so, lived a man who was always asking questions.  The kind of questions like, "Why is glass transparent?" or "Why do fruit trees grow better in that place than in this place?" or "What does the earth look like underneath the surface?"  This last question was one that he was particularly interested in, and he went so far as to work out what the rock layers looked like where he lived, and draw little pictures of them.  Now he was a marble sculptor by trade (as well as fossil hunter, mineral seller, and a few other things) so he thought it would be even better to make his little pictures in stone.  That way he could represent the layers using the actual rocks they were composed of.  Over the course of his lifetime he made almost 100 of these tablets, as he called them. Then he died.  And no one else was quite as interested in all those rocks and minerals as he was.  His collection was sold off, bit by bit, and the table...
Post a Comment
Read more

Erewash Valley Trail: Ilkeston

You could spend a lot of time following old canals and railways in the Erewash Valley. This walk included parts of the Erewash Canal, the Nottingham Canal, the Nutbrook Canal, and the Stanton branch line, and I could have continued further along any one of those, if I'd had the time. I started in Kirk Hallam, which is mostly a post-war housing estate with a distinctive outline on the map: the main road to Ilkeston through the middle, and a loop road encircling the village. It looks like the London Underground logo. I parked at the lake at the top of the loop. There was a sculpture commemorating the nearby Stanton Ironworks - the ground remembers the roar of the blast  read the inscription around the base - and the remains of a lock on the Nutbrook Canal. Heading towards Ilkeston, I crossed a former golf course, now a nature reserve called Pewit Coronation Meadows, passed a large sports centre, and was soon in the town centre. There was a general impression of red-brickiness, with l...
Post a Comment
Read more

Austin part 2

Well, I wrote about Bats, Bluebonnets and Breakfast Tacos in a previous post, but that only seemed to cover about half of what we actually did in Austin (were we really there only for a weekend?). And we had several more great photos that Graham has been bugging me to post on my blog, so prepare yourselves for an extravaganza of colour, light and image! Austin is known as a great place for live music, which presumably explains the psychadelic guitars left lying around the streets. Here's Graham with a couple of his dream instruments. We visited the Texas State Capitol, built on a grand scale from tons of pink granite and limestone. The state capit o l, you understand, is located in the state capit a l. Don't get confused. Americans definitely tend towards the domes-and-pillars school of architecture for their governmental buildings. I had a feeling this was true, so did a quick search for corroborating evidence and discovered this great site by a ph...
Post a Comment
Read more