the days after IPOP

The days after IPOP

Well all good things must come to an end. Friday we had to check out of our 5 star hotel. We decided to take a morning swim in the pool & hottub. Drakeston slept in & we decided to do a late check out so we had until 2pm. I was tempted to get back in the pool again, but packed instead.

 We had pizza hut when we left the hotel. We spent some time driving around Beverly Hills looking at the fancy cars & drove down Rodeo Dr. We stopped at The Beverly Hills Garden which has a cool BH sign, & a really big tree that is fun to climb on & carve initials in hearts in. I wanted to show Nana where we had stayed & been on our last visit to CA, that took us to Wilshire blvd in Beverly Hills. We visited the Harry Potter store that is across the st from the original agent we spoke with. So since we were in the neighborhood we went down to The La Brea Tarpits, since there was 4 of us this yr & we didn’t have as much spending money we didn’t pay to go in. We just walked along on the outside. The tarpits are next to the LACMA los angeles county museum. I was trying to be artistic & was taking all kinds of angled building & architect pics. I had told Alex if we ever were back in LA I would show him LA INK. So since we were on LA Brea & that’s where LA INK is we journeyed down to High Voltage Tattoo. I told her to park at the MCDonalds a few blocks from La Ink, & fear of being towed we purchased food, so we would be mcd’s customers, & since we were staying for more than a few mins we decided to connect to the free wifi for a bit. When we were finished walking around & looking at LA INK we drove to our Sylmar, CA hotel. It is only a 1 star hotel. Not bad except its small, only 1 full size bed. We bought a full size airbed for the boys. The bed is a bit uncomfortable, even though we bought the airbed for the boys to share Drakeston has still been sleeping with me & Nana. This place does have a hottub that has eased the back pain I get from sleeping on this bed. We stayed at this hotel for 2 nights before we went to Beverly Hills & have been here since we left BH.

The next day was Saturday we wanted to go to Venice Beach & see where we loved last yr. I didn’t have a specific address, so I kept picking Venice spots on the gps, & I would say it didn’t look familiar so we would drive somewhere else. We kept ending up in Santa Monica & Marina Del Ray, Venice is in the middle of the 2. We stopped for lunch Nana & I had Chinese & Drakeston Had subway, Alex didn’t eat cuz he ate left over pizza in the car. We ended up parking in Santa Monica & walked to Venice which was 3 miles. All of this caused us to get to the beach several hrs later then when I originally wanted to arrive. I wanted to see the midday tide hit the rocks on Venice Beach so we could see the big breaks. We missed that , so the water around the rocks was barely there on the front side. This meant Boo could climb on the rocks & He was crab searching. He collected 16-20 crabs from small to large, he had them in a bucket that we found at Santa Monica. He released them when we left. It was fun to see them scurry off, they left neat little tracks in the sand. I don’t know why there wasn’t as much water where it was the last yr, but there was a lot of seaweed & moss & various other stuff  washed up on the shore, but there were 4 dead stingrays on the beach, there were some big bones from marine animals washed up.  It was kinda gross cuz there were small flys all around. Even with all that Venice is still my favorite beach that Ive  been to.  It has street vendors & artists all along the beach. It’s a bright & colorful place. There are all kinds of music there from mixed cds to bongos & steel drums. The condos & lofts on the beach are all neat to look at. There was one for rent & last yr I said it would be cool to live in that unit. I was tempted to call the # & find out how it was going for but I didn’t want to be sticker shocked so I just let it be. We had to walk back to our car in Santa Monica which was 3 miles down shore, by this time it was dark, & all the st vendors, artists, & musicians were gone. Nana & The boys had walked ahead of me to get to a store before it closed. I was exchanging food we had bought I didn’t like it, & it took forever to get new food. I was taking pics of the sunset while they were eating, so I didn’t know I didn’t like the food when everyone else was eating. I walked almost 3 miles by myself in the dark. Being on the beach at night is a lot different then in the daytime. It was almost scary. We made it back to the hotel just in time to have 10 mins in the hottub before they closed it for the night.             

Today was Sunday we stopped at an In-N – Out Burger which is a famous burger chain in the CA area. It was ok, but not as good as the hype. We then drove to Downtown Disney to shop & look around. Nana & I got some Mickey ears, & the boys built a remote control car at Ride Makerz. I also had a charactercature made up of them. We went back to our hotel decided to find an eating place & ended up at TGIFridays. I hadn’t been there in a very long time. It was pretty good. Then we went swimming in the hottub again. I had checked the temperature before we got in the pool to see if it was gonna be cold, as I have done each time before we swam at a hotel or on the beach. Everytime it had always been around 64-66 & once you get in the water it hasn’t been all that bad, but tonight when I checked it was 84, so I was expecting the pool to be warm. It was 9:15 at night. I jumped right into the pool & quickly got out. It was the coldest water I had been in yet. A guy at BH told us he thought the hotel mustve been heating the water . I guess they were cuz the Sylmar pool was freezing & the pool in BH was warmer, even though the outside air was cooler.  We considered going back to Hollywood after leaving downtown Disney but decided we didn’t want to pay for more parking & just went back to the hotel.

Tommorrow we start the drive back home, we will make it to Gallup,NM.