Girls Day Out

Seth spent a couple of days at my parents house and since I was to come pick him up Wednesday evening, I decided to make a day out of it with my girls. I had lots of fun playing tourist in a city I lived most my life in and showing the girls not only all the famous landmarks, but also many places I worked and/or hung out as a girl/young adult.  We started off the day by boarding the blue line metro near the house I grew up in and took it to downtown's Pike.  The girls got to experience a lot of firsts, including riding a train and going on a boat.

The girls enjoying their first train ride.  Elsie kept putting her face up against the window to not miss anything and when I told her to not touch the glass with her face because lots of others had done the same thing and it was kinda gross, she commented "yeah, I can smell the dirt!"

Once we got off the blue line, we walked through the Promenade and hopped on the Passport.  The Passport is a bus that takes you to different places downtown for free.  I was hoping to walk around the Pike and see a few things, but Elsie was quite anxious to see everything as quickly as possible and didn't like having to wait the 10 minutes for the Passport to arrive, nor did she want to walk around.   Since the new Pike was built after I moved away, I will have to make a trip back down by myself or with Wayne one day.

The girls were quite impressed with just how big the Queen Mary is.  We will have to come someday as a family to actually go on it and take a few tours.

We also saw the outside of the Russian Scorpion (submarine) and ventured through the little gift shop.  Here they are posing with the suit the soldiers would have to put on if they had to evacuate the submarine during an emergency.  It is much heavier and cumbersome than our scuba diving gear we wear today.

Trying on hats is always fun.  Ay, my lil' Russian Captain.

Next we walked over to the dock where we literally just missed the Aquabus (its the small boat just above Elsie's head and pulling away) and had to wait another hour for the next one to arrive.  We decided it was the perfect time to sit down and eat our lunch and then throw pebbles into the water.

Group Selfie!!!

Riding the Aquabus and you can see my old office building in the background.

The sky looks so blue in this picture!  You can see the Queen Mary and the dome that used to house the Spruce Goose before it got moved up to Oregon.  The dome is now used for special events and to film movies, including two of the Batman's.

The Aquabus dropped us off at Shoreline Village where the girls enjoyed a mint chip ice cream, walked around the arcade, checked out a few stores and boats.  When I asked them if they would like to live close to the beach, Elsie said "No, I would miss my horses too much!"

This store has tons of crazy hats.  I am not sure anyone actually buys them , but they are always fun to try on.  My brother and I even did so as kids!

Arrr, Kya the Mermaid Pirate

Elsie as Jake from Jake and the Neverland.  She wanted to pose in this for her brother Seth.

After hanging out at Shoreline Village, we took the blue line back to get our van and finally headed down to the beach.  Normally Long Beach doesn't get waves due to the breakwater that was put in during the 1940's, but we have been having extremely high riptides and so there was actually some small waves for the girls to play in.  There were also about 100 Kite Surfers taking advantage of the small waves and slightly windy day. 

Jumping the waves together and then trying their hand had body surfing.  You can see one of the Oil Islands in the background that is used to produce oil from five major sand intervals ranging in depths from 2,000 feet to 11,000 feet.  At night the island is quite pretty when it is all lit up.

Before I married Wayne, I lived just a few blocks down the beach and although I love my life inland, I do  miss being able to walk down to the beach and rollerblade daily.  Being back for the day brought back so many memories and I was glad to share it with my girls.