Friday, June 18, 2021

The Getty and the La Brea Tar Pits

I feel so satisfied.

Ben and I have a number of favorite movies that we like to watch probably once a year, and The Hammer is one of them. It is a total B-movie but has great one-liners and a lot of witty sarcasm (featuring Adam Carrolla from The Man Show). In the movie, the main character takes his love interest on a day date to the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. When we decided to make plans for this vacation, I asked our hosts if going to the Tar Pits could be on our agenda and they were only too happy to oblige my request.

It was like I was there with Adam Carrolla as we felt what it was like to be trapped in tar, as we side-stepped the small patches of tar coming up from the ground in the middle of the grassy area, and as we viewed the replicas of wooly mammoths and wolves (so.many.wolves) getting stuck in the tar and their ultimate demise.

I highly recommend 1) watching the movie The Hammer, and 2) going to the La Brea Tar Pits if you're ever in LA!

Our first stop of the day, however, was The Getty. The Getty is an incredible art museum with groomed grounds tended by over 200 gardeners. Apparently, I didn't take any pictures of our time there, but our friend snapped this photo of us as we left (Edith didn't want to be in the picture, and yes, that is a sculpture of a naked boy holding a frog in the background). 



It was such a peaceful setting and had so many beautiful exhibits and plants (and later on our friends - and us! - would get some clips of one of the plants we saw on the grounds, called a "wandering Jew").

We went to an Ethiopian restaurant for supper that evening and ate to our heart's content on this giant platter with veggies, steak bites, and potatoes. You tear off some of the starchy base on the platter and use that to grip the food and eat it. The steak bites and seasonings on everything were sooooo good. After full tummies and a full first day in LA, we headed back to OC in prep for a simple, leisurely Sunday.

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