I've never been a beach person - nor much of a water person for that matter - there are only lakes and rivers in the land-locked Prairies scoured out of the ground by the glacial action of the last ice age and the meltwaters of the Rocky Mountains .
But, I think I could be... Place name links like Carolina Beach, NC go to Wikipedia. Place name links like Carolina Beach use the local tourism or government website.
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Petersen Automotive Museum |
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| 2012.12.26 |
Settled After the Season |
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My first snowless Christmas in 20+ years. Snowless but not alone however. TFS's daughter and her boyfriend are here, and yesterday we opened presents together, then went to her mother's place for the full-family Christmas Extravaganza. More presents, more hilarity, and more food. That's the spirit of the season, really.
Now, I can get back to logging my beach-journey experience, and pick up where I left off before we left Carolina Beach. It'll take a little time, however, as I have a lot of pictures from before we left, and as we crossed the continent. And while here on the left coast, there are things to do, social and otherwise. But while everyone is at a screening of Les Miserables, I sit in the warm 3pm sun with my laptop working my way through a jug of Mississippi Mud Black & Tan. |
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| 2012.12.27 |
Venice Beach |
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It's about time we hit the beach! Today we go to Venice Beach to walk around in the sun and have some lunch with TFS's daughter and her boyfriend before they go back home after their Christmas visit.
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Our first view of the Pacific, after passing through Topanga Canyon . Actually we saw it a couple days earlier but I didn't take any pictures. | |
| Panoramic view from the north Venice Beach parking lot. |
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| Walking south from the parking lot. |
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| Panoramic view from midway |
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| Tourists like us walking, shopping, eating and enjoying a late-December sunny day. |
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one of many sand sculptors | |
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pot shops | |
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junk vendors | |
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Muscle Beach | |
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street vendors that don't want photos taken | |
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heading back north | |
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more pot shops | |
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Venice Beach is the most, ummm... lively and "colourful" of the beaches, with characters of all types mixing in with the tourists. Vendors, mostly Mexican, sell all manner of crafts and crap, wannabe musicians set up and some try to push their CDs on you, pot shops offer "doctors" to diagnose your aches and pains and "prescribe" their medicine, big beefy guys pump and preen themselves for your view at Muscle Beach, skaters and cyclists zip through the strollers, and when the weather is warmer it gets even crazier. A cacophony of all that is the West Coast collected together 100 feet from the Pacific Ocean. |
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| 2012.12.29 |
Mall Vending |
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posh vending machine | |
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Down the road, so to speak, the Westfield Topanga Mall caters to the well-heeled shopper with the usual mall shops and higher-end retailers like Armani, Neiman-Marcus, Tiffany's, Cartier, Ferrari, Lamborghini and Tesla dealers, Louis Vuitton and this vending machine dispensing ........................................................................ caviar. |
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| 2012.12.31 |
New Year's Eve in Los Angeles |
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Today we took a little trip to Oxnard, CA to see some more beach: Silver Strand Beach . Interesting thing about this beach: the homes are right on the beach - step off the deck right into the sand. Of course this means beach-visitors can step off the sand right into your home, but that's the price of beach life I guess.
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This has been one of the most interesting years of my life. A random thought of going to see a NASCAR race turned into a cross-continental odyssey that finds me thousands of kilometers away from home, about to get up hours before I'm used to, to see the quintessential New Year's Day parade: The Rose Parade, with TFS, who I knew only through words on a screen a year ago, whom I've spent the last 3+ months with 24/7. My, how things can change. I've travelled over 15,000 km (9,000 mi) so far, in a 15-year-old car, from my comfortable high-rise life in land-locked central Alberta, to sit next to the Atlantic Ocean for long periods of time, and travel along that same Ocean, and then bundle everything up, including TFS, and head to the other coast for some number of months.
Year number 51 has been quite the year for me! |
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< Previous
Petersen Automotive Museum |
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Start
........................................ |
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Next >
The Rose Parade |
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