Hollywood & La Brea Tar Pits

Today we spent the day on foot and rain in Hollywood. The Metro system here in LA has light rail and buses. We bought day passes for all of us and rode both. L does NOT like underground rail. She thinks it is as creepy as the hotel in Holbrook. She kept asking if we could walk back instead of taking the subway.

We went to Grauman's Chinese Theater and took pictures of footprints.

Why are Sean Connery's footprints of bare feet?

We took some of the Hollywood sign, too. (It's there, close to the top of the mountain behind me.)

From Wiltshire Boulevard we took the Metro bus to the La Brea Tar Pits. It is not at all what I was expecting. For one thing, it's right in the middle of the city. It's a working laboratory and a natural history museum filled with the excavations from the tar pits on the site: dire wolves, giant sabre tooth cats, and woolly mammoths. Check out the teeth on this mastodon.

It was a really neat place.

Not too far from the Tar Pits is the Petersen Automobile Museum. Mr. H definitely wanted to go there, but the girls protests prevailed. He'll save it for a time he's out here on a business trip.

One thing I've learned on this trip is that there are a lot of different people in this world and they are all represented on the Metro in LA. I'm from a pretty much homogenous population. It is so different here. There were people from every racial and ethnic group I know of. Some spoke English and some didn't. In fact, the people who looked the most like me spoke French. And LA people live so close to each other that they create their own private spaces around themselves. I think the people on the trains with their eyes closed were the residents and all us tourists were the ones looking at everything. At one point we were on a very crowded bus going down Wiltshire. There were people in every seat and the aisles were filled with standing passengers. I leaned over to Mr. H and said that folks in George County only get this close to each other for one thing: George County football!