California!

We got into California at 8:00 in the morning. The train comes into Los Angeles. We left our luggage in a locker and went outside where we were picked up by David Johnson who is currently living just north and east of LA. He took us to his favorite breakfast place, and I will have to admit that the food was delicious. We still had a couple of hours before our San Diego connection left the station, so he took us to the Hollywood stars walk of fame in front of Grummans Chinese Theater. We also went to the Kodak Theater, where the Academy Awards Show takes place. Everything was so much smaller than I imagined, but very clean and nice. Then he took us for a real surprise. The La Brea Tarpits and Museum. It was incredible. The tar pits are still bubbling! We saw hundreds of fossils of all types of animals, wolves, bears, sloth, camel, mastedon, and of course my favorite, the Saber-toothed Cat. They are actively excavating in a couple of sites on the property and we got to watch the techs in the labs cleaning fossilized bones, reassembling skeletons and doing all sorts of cool things. It was something that I had thought about doing since the third grade and it was just as cool now as I thought it would be then.