Tuesday, August 19, 2008

A late birthday present

The girls in Long Beach were busy last month, so there was no birthday celebration. However, Meredith decided to organize something for me this month instead. She said I could pick anything I'd like to do and she'd plan it. So my friends who I love agreed to go with me to the La Brea tarpits and the Hollywood wax museum. I know it's not what everyone would choose to do for their birthday, but I'm not everybody I guess. I promised Thom that I would write a post about this, so here is the promised post.

First of all I want to personally thank Patty, Wendy, and Brian inparticular for all the amusement they provided in the car. As we were nearing the tarpits we pulled up to a stoplight, and Patty pointed out this guy (below) as the all-time low in sign holding.

It was admittedly the only time I can think of that I've seen someone using that sign holding method to advertise a yard sale.

We had some difficulty finding the tarpits. I don't know why, there were signs all over the place, but for some reason none of them appealed to us I guess. From the parking lot to the tarpits you have to climb up a hill, and then come down the other side. They have stairs built in for this purpose, but Patty opted out of the stairs, in favor of rolling down the side of the hill. Brian committed to join her, and then chickened out. I think those people at the bottom of the hill staring probably shamed him out of participating.


As for the actual tar pits. I did not anticipate that they would smell. They actually give off a pretty strong tar scent. The first one we went to was more of a lake than a pit. I would have liked to have gotten closer. I don't know why. So I could poke a stick in it or something I suppose, but they had the whole thing fenced off.
For some reason Brian wasn't all that enthusiastic about the tar pits. I can't figure out what his problem was.

We walked around the perimeter of the lake/pit and on the other side there was a bridge that allowed us to take some unobstructed pictures. However, the traffic on the road nearby made the bridge bounce, and standing above bubbling tar (It really does bubble, which was also something I had not expected) on a bridge that bounced everytime a car drove by made me a little nervous, so I didn't stay out there too long.
There was also this distressing little scene that was created to disturb visitors I guess. I can't imagine why else it was made.

I guess you can't see so well in this picture the little baby, whatever these things are. Mastadons, woolly mammoths, whatever, the baby has his trunk out and a very distressed look on it's face. We couldn't see any other pits, so we headed into the museum. We decided pretty quickly that $7 to look at few tar-stained dinosaur bones was too much, so we abandoned that idea, but we did find a map to the rest of the pits. The favorite tar pit was the one with an area that bubbled up continuosly in the same spot. For some reason the picture doesn't make it seem as interesting as it really was.
After that we went to the excavation observation deck. All the little flags indicate where bones are sticking out from the tar.
I know that it looks like there is a bunch of blue stuff all over, but that's actually just the sun shining on the little streams of tar. I think we all agreed that excavating anything from a tar pit would be a horrible job. The smell alone would make me think twice about it. I would think that an hour or so into the excavation and your head would start to hurt from the smell.

After the tar pits we took a little break for lunch. Who knew that walking around in the sun staring at tar would wear you down, but I think this picture is evidence that it can.
To my astonishment Brian did eat that entire sandwich. I'm not sure how he even managed to get it all in his mouth, but he did.

We moved along to the wax museum. The first part of the wax museum was the horror section. I don't know why I went through there. It was disgusting. I did get my picture taken with a wax Hannibal Lecter, but afterwards I decided that you can't see Hannibal well enough to be creeped out by him, so I did not include that here. There seemed to be a lot of wax dismembered body parts. I should have just skipped that whole section. Here is a picture of my favorite. On the whole I thought that the wax museum was pretty great. Some of the wax people really sucked, and you couldn't tell who they were, but there were quite a few that were really good. There are more pictures, but I'm at work, and I got distracted and only got this one loaded onto the computer at home before I left. So I guess this is all you get to see.

3 comments:

TUG said...

Now I know that I really want to go to the tar pits . . . THANKS!

Sarah said...

Looks pretty cool. Jared has been saying we need to go to the tar pits. I LOVE that Patty rolled down the hill! I SO wish I had been there...

Wendy said...

The car ride there and back was a lot of fun. Thanks for including me in your birthday plans.