Los Angeles: Mar 26: The La Brea Tar Pits, Soda Pop, BBQ, and more

After breakfast at our hotel, we decided to use the morning to visit The La Brea Tar Pits. Funnily, these turned out to be next to LACMA, where we were the previous day.

As usual, I took pictures. Di Yin also took some. The latter link goes to her first picture from this day (picture #103). When you see a picture of the Pismo Lighthouse Suites (our hotel) in the morning (picture #147), you're done with her pictures for the day. I'll link to the next day's pictures in the following post.

The Tar Pits, twelve thousand to forty thousand years old, are the world's richest deposit of ice-age fossils. We wandered around the grounds, finding them a bit stinky (which added to the ambiance), and explored the associated museum. Both were mildly entertaining.

As we walked by the tar pits, I observed that the people inside the nearby LACMA building were viewing art, mainly created by now-dead beings, while we were viewing fossils, another product of dead things. Furthermore, most of the art is made of oil, a by-product of the breakdown of animal matter; meanwhile, the fossils are also a by-product of the breakdown of animal matter.

We strolled through the sculpture garden between the tar pits and LACMA, then entered the Page Museum, which is basically a natural history museum displaying fossils from and information about the tar pits. I learned that over a million bones from six hundred species have been recovered from the tar pits, including animals such as mammoths (with a hip bone more than five feet across), mastodons, dire wolves, horses (an extinct variety of Western horses), and saber-tooth cats. Enough animals got buried that paleontologists have samples of bones from the same species at different ages.

First thing in the museum, we watched the museum's hokey introduction cartoon video. It was overly dramatic with an over-the-top plot, using expressions such as "it was becoming another death trap" and "and then a pack of dire wolves appear." In contrast, the video we watched before we left, a behind-the-scenes movie, was quite well done.

We also played with an interactive exhibit that showed how hard it is to pull oneself out of tar.

After the museum, we headed to visit a baby shower / birthday party for some friends (C and J) of Di Yin. (This was nominally the excuse for our trip to L.A.) They live in a hilltop house by Eagle Rock in Glendale. The house is nicely designed, renovated by a previous artist tenant, and has amazing views of the surrounding valley. Sorry I didn't take pictures. I could live in a house like it.

After staying at the party for a while, we bid our adieu and headed to a place I've always wanted to visit in L.A.: Galco's Soda Pop Stop. The shop is conveniently in Glendale, so we decided to stop by. It's basically a fun market devoted entirely to soda, also with a good selection of beers and unusual alcohol. I bought a lot: lemongrass soda, rhubarb soda, cucumber soda, honey wine, Asian pear sake, and four kinds of hard cider by a manufacturer (Woodchuck) that we tried and liked in Tarrytown but I hadn't seen since.

With bottles clinking in our trunk, we drove on 101 north to Pismo Beach, the town where we were to spend the night. 101 along the coast passes green hills sweeping into the ocean. We also drove along Santa Barbara's waterfront, pier, and beachy park lined with palm trees. We took 152 west from Santa Barbara, which goes through Los Padres National Forest and a vast mountain range. One bridge made us feel like we were driving in the sky. Along the drive, rain showers came and went, and were sometimes heavy. On the other side of the range, we weaved by some hills with trees that seemed artistically scattered. I later noticed these hills were used as grazing lands, and the trees were probably placed so they're spaced evenly enough that the cows wouldn't neglect any of the grass, even on a hot summer day.

Once in Pismo Beach, we checked into our hotel, the Pismo Lighthouse Suites, researched nearby restaurants, and headed out to eat. Our hotel, by the way, was remarkably nice. I'll post more about it in the next day's pictures.

We ended up eating an enormous, terrific dinner at Alex's BBQ (technically Alex Bar-B-Q). Details are in the pictures.