For details on each day of our trip, click Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7
The week before vacation, I was in Ohio for work. Drew picked me up from the airport Friday afternoon, and we drove home to meet Mom so the puppies could have their own vacation at my parents'. I switched my work clothes for vacation clothes, and we headed to Nashville.
Saturday morning, my uncle drove us to the airport. He let us leave our car at his house for the week and didn't charge $90 for parking like the airport. :)
After an unimpressive experience with Southwest, we landed in LAX around lunch. We picked up the rental car and drove over to La Brea Tar Pits.
The La Brea Tar Pits is one of the most famous fossil locations. For tens of thousands of years, natural asphalt has seeped up from the ground in this urban Los Angeles area. When animals came in contact with the sticky substance, they became trapped like flies in honey. People have been excavating the site since 1906 and have found more than one million bones. 231 species of vertebrate, 159 species of plants, and 234 species of invertebrates have been identified from the pits.
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| Walking into the park |
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| The lake at the entrance shows how animals got trapped. |
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| Can you see the tar on the surface? |
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| They have a sample observation pit set up |
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| Inside Pit 91 |
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| Inside Pit 91 |
The Page Museum accompanies the Tar Pits and displays several of the fossils found. This is also home to the current excavation projects. You can watch volunteers work to uncover even more fossils. Currently, they're working on Project 23. When completed, it could double the 3 million items the museum already owns. Dire wolves, saber tooth cats, and coyotes are some of the most common animals recovered from the pits, but Columbian Mammoths and ground sloths have also been found.
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| Fossils are on display throughout the entire museum |
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| Drew beside a Columbian Mammoth |
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| In addition to fossils, there are models of many of the animals they found. |
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| The most common animal found is a dire wolf |
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| This is an entire wall of dire wolf skulls. |
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| You can observe volunteers working in the lab. Right now they're working on Zed, the largest mammoth ever uncovered at the pits. |
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| Their storage room is also on display. |
After the Tar Pits, we headed to Hollywood! How can you not go to Los Angeles and not go to Hollywood, right?
Honestly, I wasn't super impressed. It was very cool to see the hand and foot prints in front of the Chinese theater, but it was a quick stop for me. Drew enjoyed it much more than I did. It reminded me of a mini-Times Square. We spent the rest of the day here, taking pictures and eating dinner.
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| El Capitan Theater |
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| Grauman's/Mann's/TLC Chinese Theater |
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| Drew with Will Smith |
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| One of the authentic Ming Dynasty Heaven Dogs guarding the doors |
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| Leo the MGM Lion even has his footprints here |
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| Drew with Arnold Schwarzenegger |
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| Clint Eastwood - I love what he wrote |
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| Drew with Clint Eastwood |
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| And of course, Drew with some of the Star Wars characters |
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| Walk of Fame |
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| Me with Walt Disney |
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| A shot of the Chinese Theater from across the street |
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| Hollywood & Highland had a pretty good view of the Hollywood sign. I took these with my super-zoom lens. |
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| A shot of the Hollywood & Highland shopping center |
Hint: There is shopping center in the area called Hollywood and Highland. It has lots of restaurants, stores, and a good view of the Hollywood sign. (My favorite views were at the Griffith Observatory though!) You can park at Hollywood and Highland and get your parking pass validated for a cheaper rate. Some of the stores and restaurants will validate this for you. Sometimes you have to go to the visitors center on the ground level. When we took ours to the visitors center, they didn't even check our receipt.
Our first day was very successful, and we had a great time!
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