Christmas Day

When last we left the story of my trip to LA, my family had just driven back from Ventura after candlelight services.

I went to bed with visions of sugar plums dancing in my head. The next morning I woke up to a quiet apartment. Brian likes to sleep in most of the time and this day was no exception. I sat down in front of the TV and tried to find something interesting to watch while eating a bowl of Life cereal.

After a while my brother woke up and we got in touch with our parents. We headed to their hotel, picked them up, and headed down to Santa Monica. We parked near the beach and headed for the boardwalk. We mainly just wandered around that day, enjoying the 70 degree weather and the crash of ocean waves. We walked to the Santa Monica pier, which has an amusement park and all sorts of shops and little kiosks on it. You can see the silouette of the ferris wheel in the sunset picture in this post.

While walking along the pier there were a number of street performers, and artists, and people hawking all manner of wares. Here are pictures from a couple of performers.

After the beach we headed to the Third Street Promenade, where I found the shoes I was going to buy. We just walked around people watching and came across another street performer. He was an escape artist. My family had seen him before I got into town, and I was only able to see the end of his act, but I guess he was pretty good. I don't have any pictures ready to post of him, but I might put some up later. We stopped for lunch after a while, which was where we saw the funny dog in this post.

After dinner we headed back down to the beach and walked along the boardwalk toward our car. Ooo, on the way there we saw a Lotus Elise. It was a pretty hot looking car. I don't have any pictures up yet, but I will. Near the end of our walk, on Muscle Beach, there was this aparatus that looked like a giant piece of equipment from a elementary school playground. Basically it was a long row of rings. The goal being to swing from ring to ring all the way to the end and back. There was a group of friends hanging out doing the rings and cheering each other on. It was pretty cool. A few of them were really good, and a few others were just learning the tricks of the trade. A few pictures of this are here.

Before too long we had almost made it too the car and the sun started to go down.