LA adventures with wang

first stop the getty - closed on mondays.

second stop - la brea tar pits. the museum was built in the seventies and hasn't much been updated, but i thought the video was hilarious and how much updating can you do to million year old fossils of towering ground sloths? (pictures to come) the museum had nice displays of whole animals like mammoths, ground sloths (3 kinds), saber-tooth tigers, giant wolves, camels, horses, and birds that used to live in LA a looooong time ago. they had a wall with hundreds of wolf skulls. and they had some plungers in tar that you could lift up and down just to see how difficult it would be to escape being stuck in tar. you cant. no way, you are a goner. which is why they have excavated thousands of whole fossils in an area about the size of a football field.

outside they had a tarpit with fake mammoths trapped in death throes. there were also places in the park where tar just leaked to the surface... it is super sticky and probably doesn't taste good... but i'll never tell. they had a dig site open so you could see what it looks like. what they are excavating is basically bones trapped in asphalt - hard work. they only excavate in the summer so no one was working in it. in one quarter of a basketball court they excavate more than 2000 bones in three months and that is with breaking it out of asphalt and all the detailed documentation about exactly where it was in the pit. and they had some funny statues of sloths and bears perfect for hugs and pictures.

next stop - cookie break! in one of my travel books it sounded to good to be true... but it was even better! at diddy reese you can pick any two cookies you want and an ice cream flavor and they will slap it together into an ice cream sandwich for a buck fifty(!). awesome. wang and i wanted to same thing which was hilarious. and then his second choice was the same as my second choice. funny. but delicious. i had to have two - and that was lunch for the day.

wang has a really big spiky pine cone in the floorboard of his passenger seat named bob. death to your toes if you arent careful. wang and i decided that i needed one for my car for my roadtrip so we drove north to the san gabriel mountains on a quest for betty. wang laughed at me as i scrambled down the hillside and contemplated which one was more perfect. in the end i carefully carried three up the slope and still havent decided (i have two riding shotgun in my floorboard awaiting final decision). we hiked nearby for a couple hours and watched the sun setting over the far off pacific ocean.

when we had enough, we went in search of pie n' burger, also in my travel book. and as the name implies we had pie and burgers. and they were delicious. :) and the pies were homemade. yum.