Everything our little family does is done quickly and our vacations are no exception. In the spring, Ross found out about a soccer game between Manchester City and Real Madrid being played in Los Angeles in the Summer and a trip was born.
We had three days, book ended by half days of travel, to get as much sight-seeing and fun in as we could. Now, nearly a week later, I'm still tired.
We left on a Tuesday afternoon and I realized that we always leave for vacations, at least when we are flying, and it's really stressful so in the future, we need to leave in the morning or at least mid day, not 4 pm.
We arrived at the Long Beach airport. We found the house we were renting and I had a mini panic attack that it was too hot and too musty and it wasn't going to work. After dinner at Wahoo's I calmed down a bit. It was a cute but very old house with bad wifi, no TV (even though it was promised and yes we complained), and one bathroom. But, we survived.
Day two had us up bright and early in the morning to head along the Pacific Coast Highway to Crystal Cove State Park Beach. It's my new favorite. We had the beach to ourselves for a very long time and the boys had so much fun playing in the water, hunting for crabs and urchins in the tide pools and getting covered in sand. We wrapped up the morning with a walk up a hundred or so stairs to Ruby's Diner Shake Shack and it wad delicious. The beach is just so calming and great.
After that, we headed back to the house, got cleaned up and drove into Los Angeles to go to the LaBrea Tar Pits. Pretty cool. Smelled like asphalt. Boys had fun.
We ate a quick snack at the Farmer's Market food place at the Grove shopping center, found a MUJI for me to buy notebooks to my hearts contentment and then headed to the soccer game at the LA Colosseum.
The Colosseum is incredibly old, outdated, unsafe, and gross. The seats were rusty and had holes and were covered in spider webs. Quinn wouldn't even sit in his and spent the first half of the game on my lap. There were also no railings anywhere in the stadium. When the stairs are THAT steep, and everyone is THAT drunk, you'd figure some railings would come in handy (get it, handy!) . We however, persevered and watched the game.
We were directly across the aisle from a huge contingency of Man City fans, which made Ross pretty happy. They were fairly calm the first half and we only endured a little rowdy behavoir. That was however made up for in the second half. People without seats in the section were filling the stairs (fire hazard), the 32 oz beers in souvenir cups were flowing and the borderline appropriate songs were being sung. Once Man City was up 3-0, I convinced Ross that we could leave. It was a pretty interesting experience and when I left to use the restroom in the middle of the second half, I ratted out all those crazy fans as a fire hazard to the first security person I could find.
Rule follower I am.
The great thing about going to a soccer match that doesn't start at 8:30 pm, when your kids brains thing it's 9:30 pm is that everyone falls asleep on the way back to the rental and minus the fact that the house was pretty warm, slept like babies for the whole night.
Day 1 was a victory!
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