Saturday, April 16, 2016

The Griffith Observatory and a Hollywood Meltdown

The next day we drove into LA to the Griffith Observatory. It was super busy. Parallel parked cars lined both sides of the road, a steep drop off one side. We finally found a spot a bit more than half a mile away. We hiked up to the observatory.


The Hollywood sign in the distance. It's a bit blurry in the photos.


The first floor holds lots of informative exhibits like this one for learning the phases of the moon.

Looking at the sun thru a series of special viewing lenses. 

Outside stairs take you up to the roof where interesting views await.

Downtown Los Angeles barely visible amidst the smog.

A beautiful view of the trails at Griffith Park.




When we had finished seeing everything, we went to relax on the grass lawn for a bit. That's when it happened. Asher had an epic meltdown. Bigger than you can even imagine. He stood on the sidewalk 15 feet in front of us and screamed and cried because "his legs hurt" and he wanted to be carried. He's 5. I had been carrying him and set him down about 10 seconds before said meltdown. He cried for FIFTEEN minutes! People stared at him. At us. It was embarrassing, but we don't respond to tantrums, never have. We told him we were right here for him when he was ready.


Finally he rolled to Daddy and eventually the flailing arms and legs stopped. Upon arrival to the museum, we had told the kids they could have a popsicle on our way out. We still did and both kids walked the entire way back to the truck without even asking to be held.


Obviously his legs didn't hurt that bad. We were able to talk about it with him later and he admitted that his legs were fine and he understood that the meltdown was a mistake. Whew, parenting, it's no joke! Fortunately he's never had a meltdown like this before and hasn't since.

Wednesday, April 6, 2016

Hiking LA- Devil's punchbowl

Another TripAdvisor suggestion was Devil's Punchbowl Natural Area. It did NOT disappoint! The drive there was interesting and the view from the nature center alone was gorgeous. The 300 ft drop into the canyon with the 8,000 ft snow-capped San Gabriel mountains above us was an incredible site.

Inside the nature center, the ranger introduced us to a collection of live honey ants, 
showed us a live scorpion glowing under blacklight...



...and let them hold fossilized dinosaur scat! Asher was in awe! 



We chose to hike the Loop Trail, veering off a bit to find some of the arches before coming back to finish the trail.



The deep canyon was created by large amounts of water from the San Gabriel mountains cutting thru the rocks as well as the movement of three different fault lines in and around the area.




Here we heard a beautiful birdsong, it turned out to be my first California Thrasher sighting! 

This is a manzanita tree. The seeds have a very hard shell and can only grow after an animal eats and "processes" it or after a fire. A fire will burn thru the outer shell, but not harm the actual seed, so the spring after a forest fire will see lots of new manzanita sprouting. During a drought, it has the ability to seal off sections to save itself. The gray section is dead, the red is the live plant. Once a water supply is more plentiful, it will grow again, twisting around the dead parts.

This large rock has a stripe of small different kinds of rocks imbedded. Very interesting! 


It's fun to include reading, number recognition and math 
wherever we are, especially along the trail. The beauty of unschooling. 

Once we made it to the bottom of the canyon, we were met with a small stream. 
Daddy pulled out the Lifestraw and let the kids take a sip of the cold, mountain water. 


It was a fairly steep climb out using switchbacks, but we immensly enjoyed the entire hike. 

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Hiking LA- Vasquez Rocks


The day before leaving Coronado, we hadn't made reservations for our next campground. Our only real requirement was that it was a safe area within a reasonable driving distance from downtown Los Angeles. It happened to be a holiday weekend, so we were lucky to find a site at the Californian RV Resort in Acton. Upon arrival I began checking nearby opportunities. Vasquez Rocks came up as one of TripAdvisor's top recommendations, a hiking area that we had previously heard about from our friends.


It sits along the San Andreas Fault and the resulting rock formations have made this a popular filming location for movies, television, music videos and advertising. Film credits include The Flintstones, Planet of the Apes, Star Trek, Roswell, New Girl, 24, NCIS, and Michael Jackson's "Black or White" video.


This was a fabulous wonderland for us to explore!






Climbing down the crack. This is much steeper than it appears.


Happy girl, in her element.




Journey opted to wait at the bottom while Asher and Daddy 
climbed to the top of this section. See them at the very top?