Southwestern road trip: L.A.

  We ended up the trip with the marathon drive to L.A. across the Mojave Desert. We spent the night in a trucker town called Kingman, Arizona. The main drag has about 30 hotels and motels of varying quality. A 100-foot American flag waves over one of the many huge truckstops. The TV in the hotel lobby had Fox News on. People were glued to it at the breakfast buffet. I swear I think I saw some old guy miss his mouth with a forkful of fake scrambled eggs while he was watching. I doubt I’ll be going back to Kingman.

Anyway, we ended up where my 18-year-old Alex was then living, in Venice Beach. Here’s a shot of Sophia’s first time touching the Pacific Ocean (Sonja’s with her, but her first time was when we went to Oregon several years ago):


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Here’s a couple of shots of what’s apparently the hottest West Coast trend in Asian wedding photos. These are two entirely separate young couples being photographed in cheesy romantic poses by their own photographer:

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Here’s the other couple:


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Here’s the “graffiti wall” where such activity is allowed. Apparently you can’t do it anywhere else anymore, so you have to sign up with some kind of uniformed person who then lets you spray on the wall. Yeah, I know, pretty stupid:


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Other than the hideously overcrowded and aggressive I-10 coming into town, L.A. is not that difficult to drive around in. One incredibly huge plus it has over just about any other medium-to-large city I’ve been in is that it actually has plenty of parking.


We were blown away by the Page Museum, aka the LaBrea Tar Pits. I had read about how lame the place was and so we almost didn’t go. But apparently they’ve done some upgrading, and it’s an amazingly informative site.

The Tar Pits — actually they’re more correctly called “asphalt pits” because tar is actually a manmade substance — are smack dab in the middle of downtown L.A. They’re actually part of a park up on which sits the Page Museum and the adjacent L.A. County Museum of Art. The tar still bubbles, emitting stinky methane from deep down in the earth’s bowels (nice image, huh?). Sometimes the tar bubbles up in the lawn of the park and they have to get out the orange cones to put around it.

Here’s the biggest pool of tar with a nearby skyscraper in the background:


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The amount of wildlife, most of it now extinct, that’s been excavated from the tarpits is stunning. All of the creatures are Ice Age creatures, about 10,000 years ago. (A single prehistoric Native American skeleton has been unearthed in the area.)

The process was simple: During the heat of the spring and summer when the tar was at its stickiest, plant-eaters, mostly the young and the feeble, would get stuck, whereupon of course they would be magnets for carnivores. That’s why so many of the excavated skeletons are of carnivores like Saber-tooth Cats and Dire Wolves — because the carnivores would just go nuts and swarm all over their stuck prey, getting stuck themselves. The reason why so few nocturnal creatures have been excavated is because at night the tar cooled and most little paws would just pad right over it without getting stuck.

We took a long look inside the mouth of Pit 91, the most active current excavation project at the site. They’ve been at it since the late ’60s and have at least 40 more years of excavation to do on that one pit alone. One reason it takes so long is because funding is short and crews only work three months out of the year, on a volunteer basis only. Another reason is the sheer mass of wildlife in the pits.

To illustrate this, here’s a shot of Pit 91. Each of the flags you see marks an actual visible bone or bone fragment of some mammal stuck in the pit thousands of years ago:


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Here’s another shot of Pit 91:


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Everything that comes out, bone or no bone, is taken to the Page Museum’s lab where volunteers painstakingly clean, identify, sort and catalogue every single thing. Here’s a view of the see-through portion of the lab where visitors can look in and see the work being done:


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OK, that’s all for the great Southwestern road trip. Posting on it took much, much longer than the trip itself. That’s a comment on something, I’m just not sure what.

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