Good morning Los Angeles! This morning’s sunrise was beautiful, glad I managed to get up in time to see it!

No real plans for today maybe we’ll try to get into “Wheel of Fortune”, “Price is Right” or “Jeopardy”! Worth a shot right? We’re right next to the La Brea Tar Pits, maybe we should go there? I love my home town!

Guess what, my back is finally feeling better! That makes this one of the best days ever!

Last night we walked down to “Little Next Door” on 3rd Street. It’s a French restaurant and is an extension of “The Little Door”. We each had a pasta dish that was very good. We finished off our dinner with Macarons, they were wonderful! By the way, Macarons are not Macaroons. Macaroons are coconut cookies.

I love that both of the places we’ve had dinner offered small sweets in addition to the regular desserts on the menu. Night before last we had these little chocolate covered bite-sized flourless chocolate cakes, they were delicious too and just the right amount after dinner.

Well we just found out that none of the game shows are taping today so it’s off to see the La Brea Tar Pits!

The La Brea Tar Pits were incredible, did you know they’ve found whole Mastodons and Mammoths in the tar, which is actually asphalt since tar isn’t naturally occurring. They weren’t of course all in one piece but all the pieces were there and they put them together. They also found Saber-toothed cats (Saber-toothed Cats were named the state fossil of California in 1973), how cool is that!

My heart broke thinking about how horrible it was for those animals trapped in the asphalt! They have a demonstration area where you can try to pull a plunger out of the asphalt. My husband who is a pretty big guy couldn’t pull the plunger out of some of the asphalt demos and it took all of his strength to pull it out of others. These poor animals got stuck then struggled which makes it worse then they fell on their sides and were incapacitated. At that point they began to draw predators who grabbed pieces off of them until they themselves fell in and were trapped.

We saw the skeletons of extinct Camelops found in Rancho La Brea who are as large as Camels but more closely related to Llamas.

They are still excavating and finding new skeletons.

It was an amazing experience and I highly recommend it for everyone especially for children, they absolutely love it!

Next we visited the Los Angeles Museum of Art, wow what a place!!!

We saw Picasso’s, Monet’s, Modigliani’s, it was awe inspiring and wonderful!

It’s so large that we spent at least 3.5 hours and barely scratched the surface. We weren’t able to see one entire building. We saw 3 floors of art in one building and were completely overwhelmed.

We plan to go back at some point in the future.

I took a lot of photos but I’ll only post a few here.

This is a Vanuatu Figurative Slot Drum.

This is a Hand Drum from Papua New Guinea c.1850. It is wood, fiber, shell and cassowary feathers.

Note the turtle feet at the table base.

There was so much information about the above table that I decided to post the photo of its placard that I took.