Road Trippin’ with the kids

When you’re the only adult on a road trip with 2 kids you get outvoted on the places-to-stop. You don’t get to pick the music either, but that’s a whole other story…

Beach stops. Very important. This is Pismo Beach halfway between San Jose and Los Angeles. Yes, it was cold enough for hoodies and beanies. But not too cold to build sand castles.

Next up, a strange little place called Ostrichland near the town of Solvang. Pay a couple of bucks and they give you a pan full of food. You walk out the the ostrich pens and feed the birds. They try to grab the pans from you.

In Santa Barbara, we make a deal. I want to visit the Courthouse and the Mission. They get to pick the zoo and a surrey ride on the beach. SoCal is full of white adobe/mission style architecture, and I count on the warm sun to help un-flatten it for me with some great shadows. No such luck, no sun on most of this trip.

A little doorway at the Mission Santa Barbara.

And a corner of the huge courthouse building.

Next up: LA. This is the Columbian Mammoth skeleton, unearthed in what is now the underground parking garage of LACMA in Los Angeles. Sketched at the Page Museum by LA Brea tarpits. The Page got it right: the mammoth skeleton is displayed in a room where the upper part is painted a dark color. When you look up at these colossal white bones, the dark color throws them in relief, making them easy to see.

Lots more sketches from my roadtrip, on my blog.