Scott needed to get back to Houston for work, so we went back towards LA so as to be closer to the Burbank airport. We ended up staying at an RV park in Northridge. It will go down as our least favorite place to stay. It doesn’t even matter what we face in the future, it will be difficult to be as awful as the place we stayed in Northridge. We were backed up to an extremely busy road (seven lane major thoroughfare). The cars and trucks traveled up and down the road at breakneck speeds (and very loudly) all hours of the day and night. The RV park didn’t allow the dog to be walked inside the park, so we were forced to walk Gracie down the very busy street a couple of blocks to get to the nearest park for grass. It was awful.
We tried to stay busy in order to not focus on how bad where we were staying was.
After we took Scott to the airport, the kids and I went to the California Science Center. I was a little taken aback when I bought tickets at the window since it was “by donation”. Thrilled at the idea of everyone having an opportunity to visit the science museum, we donated what we would have paid at most of the other science centers. The place was absolutely packed. It was so packed with school field trips, we couldn’t move from one exhibit to another. So we went to the cafeteria and ate and waited on the school kids to go back to their schools. The plan worked great. Once it was a little quieter, we thoroughly enjoyed the science center.
Endeavor on display.
We were able to see one of the space shuttles, as well as having multiple exhibits on different ecosystems.
The astronauts’ toilet. We studied this for too long.
It’s a definite must for science and nature enthusiasts. It was pretty great learning more about the kelp forests that we had gone diving in the week before. We should’ve just done it in a different order.
Another day, the kids and I took our bikes and drove to the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Center. We stopped for the kids to get another junior ranger badge and then headed to the hills.
It was funny when we got lost, but not so funny when we finally figured out where we were and where we wanted to go, but were too tired to actually make it. I really wanted to see the MASH sitcom scenes, but we just couldn’t do it. The park was beautiful though.
At one point we found the western scene that Paramount Movies used for tons of their films.
All in all, LA has much more to offer than what most might think. I’d love to spend more time there, but I would never want to go back to the place we stayed. Either way, we were all pretty excited to head to Yosemite when Scott returned.