Sculpture by Chris Burden located at the Wilshire Boulevard entrance to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The 2008 installation consists of restored street lamps from the 1920s and 1930s. Most used to light the streets of the city!
On my recent visit to downtown Los Angeles I was able to see things in the city I had never seen before! It was amazing, and I thank my friends Flo and Suzanne and Craig for great tours of the city! Let me take you along!
Sculpture by Chris Burden located at the Wilshire Boulevard entrance to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The 2008 installation consists of restored street lamps from the 1920s and 1930s. Most used to light the streets of the city!
I was told that Leonardo di Caprio kindly replaced every bulb with an LED! I love how he cares about our planet. Suzanne Stavert of Adventures of Empty Nesters and her husband, Craig, took me on a really fun tour of Hancock Park! Michael Heizer’s “Levitated Mass”. Heizer rarely explains or comments on his work and has never offered a public explanation of Levitated Mass’s meaning or significance. It’s a big rock, let me tell you! 340 tons!I think I learned about the tar pits from an animated film my children loved, Land before Time. The reality of these pits is overwhelming! Mammoths, Mastodons, Sabre Tooth Tigers and Dire Wolves are just a few of the animals caught in the tar pits. The tar is so sticky that animals became stuck, which drew predators to eat them, becoming stuck themselves. The tar pits are aged 50,000 years to just 10,000 years ago, during the Ice Age. There are no dinosaurs but their descendants, birds.
Pretty incredible!
They are still extracting bones from the pits! Who knows how deep it might go?
The pits and their treasure was found during oil production!
A sad example of getting caught in the tar.
Can you see the methane bubbles still bubbling today? Hardy bacteria embedded in the natural asphalt are eating away at the petroleum and burping up methane. Of the bacteria the researchers isolated in tar pit samples, about 200 to 300 are previously unknown species. An American Mastodon!Nice kitty.
An American Giant Bear. Can you imagine running into this guy??? He is 12 ft tall!
This is a Teratron, an Eaglelike bird with a ten foot wingspan.
An American Dire Wolf. Yes, there really were Dire Wolves!
The Chua Ba Thien Hau temple in Chinatown. It’s the New Year of the Pig!
It’s the Year of the Pig! I am an Earth Pig in Chinese Astrology.
The temple is absolutely gorgeous, and I lit a few joss sticks while I was there! I wish you good joss! Good Luck!Here I am at LA’s famous Phillipe’s for lunch!And I was in Los Angeles for NATJA’s Award Dinner, thrilled to receive two awards. It was a quick weekend, but a great one!
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Tam Warner
Award Winning Travel Journalist and Blogger, writing about Eclectic Travels in the Empty Nest! From scuba to luxury cruises to kayaking to expeditions, Tam is ready to go!
Contact me at travelswithtam@gmail.com