At least, that's what you must do if you're in LA with me!
Aquariums don't photograph well, so I have to make memories with my brain and not my camera, ugh. Not that there's room in my brain for additional memories what with all the 1980s TV theme songs I've got memorized, but whatever. I did my best!
Nevertheless, I did get a few good shots at the Aquarium of the Pacific:
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The kids and I were ALL about these embossing stations for our aquarium guidebooks. It was like a little Junior Ranger activity!
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| We were OBSESSED with the octopuses. They're so beautiful, and they always seemed so busy! |
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| This kid will NEVER pass up a toddler activity. |
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| There's her axolotl swimming around on the big screen! |
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| I was also personally pretty obsessed with this Giant Japanese Spider Crab. Its legs are so spindly, and it can grow to be 12 feet! |
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| The only thing the big kid likes better than a toddler activity is a touch tank. |
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| This is the first time that I have EVER encountered a jellyfish touch tank! It was even kind of tucked away in a back area away from the crowds, as if a jellyfish touch tank isn't the coolest thing in the zoo?!? |
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| We touched ALL the jellyfish. |
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| I've only ever seen sand dollars washed up on the beach. I had no idea that they're fuzzy! |
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| We spent most of an hour watching this California Twospot Octopus bop around busily in its tank. |
Considering that we'd gotten to the Aquarium of the Pacific right when it opened, leaving mid-afternoon was a pretty good run, but still, we were only able to convince the big kid to come away with us by reminding her that the next item on our agenda was a DIY food tour of the Long Beach area. I didn't keep track of everywhere we went since we were navigating by committee, but check out my delicious spicy machaca burrito with endless pours of jamaica on the side:
Parking in Long Beach is MISERABLE, but we found a doughnut shop where we could park at a laundromat down the block and sneak over in case there are, like, laundromat parking police--which I'm sure there are! You can't tell by the look of it, but each of us ordered one single doughnut at this shop:
I don't know if they were about to close or the doughnut dude was just overstocked or what, but for each of us, he put our doughnut in its baggy, then literally poured doughnut holes in until each bag was crammed full. They only don't look crammed full in the above photo because we'd been stuffing ourselves with doughnut holes as fast as we could before I remembered that I wanted a photo.
Did we leave room for In-n-Out?
Nope, but we still did our best!
Is the most cliched California experience spending sunset on the beach, your tummy full from In-n-Out?
Probably not, but that's what feels the most like California to me!
Don't worry, because we DID follow our tradition the next day of having the most miserable experience traveling home from vacation. Why does flying home always suck SO badly and in such unique ways? I had a panic attack on my first (and last!) Southwest flight when people kept telling me the seat next to them was saved for literally every single available seat--apparently, you're just supposed to sit down anyway because you can't actually save seats on Southwest, but I did not know that so I just wandered up and down the aisle having flashbacks to lunchtime at my first day in junior high, when I ALSO couldn't find anyone who'd let me sit with them. AND you don't get movies, which I guess is fine because I had my nook but I wanted to read my nook AND watch a movie. But then there was bad weather at our layover airport so we had to go to a different airport, but there wasn't actually room for us at that airport so they wouldn't let us off the plane and we just sat on their runway for two hours. You know what would have made that way more bearable? A movie! After that, we waited another hour to refuel and then flew back to the now super crowded layover airport where we thankfully got squeezed onto the last flight of the night, which was a redeye, so instead of getting home at 8 the previous evening we got home at 6 the next morning and we all went straight to bed.
Each vacation's uniquely miserable return experience is probably the universe's way of making sure I'm happy to be home!
And here's the rest of our trip!
P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!
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