California Tourists

Sometimes it's fun to be a tourist in your own backyard.  Granted, I'm not from the LA area, so it's not my backyard actually... more like my neighbor's backyard.  You get it.  Anyhow, Eric had to fly out to the Long Beach area for work this past week so the kids and I drove up to see him.  Since he had to work all day we got to venture out and explore some of the LA areas.  Our first stop as Cali tourists was Santa Monica.  It wasn't too far from Long Beach and I knew that the kids would LOVE the amusement park on the pier.  I foolishly thought that we would only spend a few hours in Santa Monica and then be done and ready to move on to the next beach town.  Yeah, that was so not the case.  Between the pier, the downtown area shops, and the Muscle Beach people watching, we ended up spending all day there.  Before I knew it Eric was calling to say he was done working and ready to go eat dinner.  That's how you know you've had a good day... flies right by.

Ryder with his hand up in the air saying "let's do this!"... boy has no fear.  He loved all the rides.  I was surprised that he was allowed to ride some of them.  As long as Savannah went with him he was allowed to ride.  There were a few that Savannah was kinda afraid to ride and he was pulling her into the line saying "peeze ride, sissy".

The ferris wheel was pretty awesome.  I am not typically a huge ferris wheel fan... kinda too high and shaky for me... but this one is over the ocean, how could I say no.  I am glad that I went on it... the view was amazing.

After our first round of rides we headed down off the pier and went strolling along the famous Muscle Beach.  I was pretty excited to find out that it is home to the original Hot Dog On A Stick stand.  One of my favorites!  So we grabbed some corn dogs and sat down and people watched for a bit.  There are some absolute crazies out in Santa Monica, so the people watching was pretty spectacular.

Our last stop of the day was to an old school arcade that is on the pier.  Seriously, this place still takes quarters to play the games.  I was shocked when I didn't to prepay and load a card or something.  There were a few newer games, but 95% of them were old school.  Savannah and Ryder both were in arcade heaven.  The games must have been pretty cheap, because we only spent $20 and we played almost everything in there multiple times.

Who knew that the historic route 66 came to an end on the Santa Monica pier.  I sure didn't.  Pretty cool factoid.  Savannah had no clue why I asked her to take a picture with this sign.  Since everyone else around us was doing it too, she didn't question me for long.