Do you ever get pissed that you can't visit every place in the entire world and see every cool thing that there is to see?
There are so many exciting wonders to experience, and we're missing almost all of them!
Even though I'm all the time, nearly constantly, missing out on nearly every magical thing to see and do, it IS satisfying to see just this one magical thing that I've longed to experience since the first time I learned about it.
Welcome to La Brea Tar Pits!
The website is really confusing because it makes it seem like you have to pay the admission price just to see the tar pits, but when we got there it actually seems like the admission is only for the museum and the tar pits are free? Or at least there was nobody to take our money at the kiosks around the perimeter of the park, only at the museum. That actually makes the museum kind of shockingly expensive for a family of four, but at least the kids could pull out their student IDs to knock a couple of bucks off.
Tangent, but ever since my kids have grown up enough to be considered "adults" for the purpose of most admission tickets, I've realized that Adult admission to places that encourage you to go as a family, like museums and zoos, is a fucking RACKET. I swear they bump the price to make the Child ticket at half the price feel like a deal, and it's not even so unreasonable when you split the difference, but those four adult tickets stacked on top of each other are a LOT. I think multiples of adult tickets should get some kind of puny discount, because otherwise we're going to have to start drawing straws to see who gets to go into the cool stuff and who has to sit in the car.
Ah, well. What even is money on a vacation, especially not when there are mastodon bones to look at!
And ground sloths!
Antique bison!
American lion!
The tar pit stuff is all crazy interesting. Check out this little bone that a rodent was once upon a time eating on!
And this knife blade that was purposely coated in tar!
This camel that died with stuff stuck in its teeth!
The two most superior animals to ever have fallen in the tar pits are OBVIOUSLY dire wolves and saber-tooths.
We're at the point in family life where when I tell every family member to go and pose dramatically with the saber-tooth recreation so I can take all their photos, even the most unenthusiastic family member just sighs and obeys.
Guess who the most enthusiastic family member is, though?
Ahem.
This is my favorite exhibit:
Check out 404 dire wolf skulls! I was only sad because the display goes up so high that I couldn't get the best look at half of them:
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| This is me looking straight up. |
Here are the best dire wolf skulls:
The bones are so cool that it kind of makes you forget that starving to death while being stuck in tar is a horrible way to die, and actually suffocating to death in tar is even more horrible. The museum had an interactive display to demonstrate how hard it is to pull yourself out of tar:
Yeah, I could have NEVER.Outside the museum, there's a park (that may or may not be free?) that encompasses many of the extant tar pit sites:
Didn't pack bug spray, oops:
The lake pit looks the most tar pit-ish to me, but I think it might actually be the least accurate looking:
The "lake" is groundwater and rainwater that's collected in an abandoned asphalt excavation. Tar and methane do bubble up through it, but I *think* the proper tar pits that trapped all the animals were actually pretty shallow.
This is more like what I think the tar pits would have looked like, if you can imagine secret tar also under all the dirt and leaves around the puddle of visible tar:
There aren't any current active excavations of the tar pits, but as you walk around you can see photos from old excavations, and an open pit that looks like the workers just stepped away for a lunch break:
The current and ongoing project involves going through a huge amount of material collected via rescue paleontology during the construction of the LA County Museum of Art next door:
Papped a paleontologist!
I was having so much fun peeping through fences to look at all the named tar pits--
--that it actually took me a long time to notice that there was tar bubbling up EVERYWHERE! Little puddles and sticky bits were all over, sometimes marked--
--but often not. Since it's not a national park site or anything, the big kid helped me collect a little souvenir:
My little tar stick is my favorite souvenir from this trip!
I could have stayed for the rest of the day, just rolling around in little tar pits and poking around looking for bones, but there was not a speck of shade, and I had long ago worn out the patience of our least-enthusiastic participant, ahem, so I reluctantly allowed myself to be dragged out and into the awful LA traffic.
I had a few ideas for other places to stop at, but omg the traffic was so horrible that the only place we ended up visiting was Milk Bar. It's crazy expensive but I'd heard it was absolutely delicious--
--and it was!
I was especially thrilled with my pint of soft-serve ice cream layered with cakey parts and fudgy bits and crunchies. I also brought my pint jar home as a souvenir, and I fondly look forward to building my own layered ice cream creation and eating it with a wooden spoon.
But that's for later. Tomorrow we go to the aquarium and make up our own food tour!
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!
