Sometimes Heading off the Path is Better

We are learning a lot as we continue setting out to explore this enormous city we live in, and today we learned another valuable lesson when it comes to exploring this morning! Thanks to the super cool book I wrote about last time we went out adventuring, we found another new place to play today.  We thought we'd take advantage of the gorgeous November weather (okay, it's almost too warm for me!) and packed up to head down to the Beverly area of LA to Pan Pacific Park, a public park that had a train theme to it.  Seeing as how our little guy is obsessed with choo-choos and we've had a lot of fun exploring the variety of public parks LA has to offer we thought we'd check it out.

The playground was pretty cool, although I'm not sure there was anything about it that made it exceptionally stand out from other playgrounds we've been to.  It did have a "train" to drive, but it wasn't quite what we had pictured.  Aidan did love "driving" but it didn't hold his attention for all that long.

 The choo choo to drive

Peek a boo!

He was too busy telling me what letters were on the sign to look at the camera apparently.

 

 The Pan Pacific Park

Exploring with daddy

Unfortunately, there was a little boy at the park who had a little ride-on car that my little "driver" got obsessed with and could not get over the fact that it wasn't his to ride.  So once he saw that and was told no, he wanted nothing to do with the rest of the park.  We had to change scenery, so I suggested we go exploring down some of the paths in the park.  We couldn't figure out what kind of "garden" we ended up in, but upon more exploring realized it was part of the Los Angeles Holocaust Museum.  It was very cool, a 2 minute walk across the park we had been in. 

So we kept exploring the museum, and found some powerful outdoor memorials...

A wall where you could places notes or thoughts into little holes, like a wailing wall.

Outside were huge pillars with some of the history written on them year by year throughout the WWII era. (That would be Aidan there in the background playing with the water fountain....hey whatever kept him occupied was fine with me!)

We wandered inside just to look, and found that it was a free museum and we were the only ones there at the time.  We obviously couldn't spend much time looking at anything with a toddler running around, but I snapped a few photos and we definitely would love to come back minus the little one.

Part of a display about the Jewish faith and monotheism.  This is a Hebrew scroll of part of the Old Testament which I thought was so beautiful.

It's a museum with very little to read, they really encourage you to do the audio tour (which we obviously couldn't do today), but this was the display of people who resisted the Nazis--Miep Gies, Anne Frank and Oskar Schindler being some of them.

Back outside crunching the few leaves that had fallen.

Our initial plan was to finish at the park and then drive over to have lunch at The Grove, but when we looked at our maps we realized The Grove was just across the park, so we loaded Aidan into the stroller and set off for a quick 5 minute walk.  We arrived at The Grove to find a ginormous Christmas tree.  I feel like it's a bit early for this especially since it was 80 degrees, but it was beautiful against such a blue sky! (Aidan was 100% NOT impressed by the way.  I had told him there was a Choo Choo at The Grove (a little trolley that runs up and down the shopping plaza) and he was busy looking for that.  Which doesn't start running til 1 PM by the way--we were there at 11:30--so needless to say someone was a tiny bit cranky about not seeing the choo choo AND not getting to drive the "little car!" at the park...whoops!)

I love the fountain here, I could watch it for quite awhile.

So could Aidan :)

We had a bit of drama figuring out where to eat--we were going to eat at The Farmer's Market but we ended up at Johnny Rocket's instead...not super unique but a place we all enjoy that was going to be fast, relatively inexpensive and with high chairs :)

Um and they have butterfinger milkshakes.  Definitely a plus!

Aidan is now officially a bit fan of "mook shakes!"

So today we learned is that sometimes the original "adventure" isn't all that cool, but at least in LA if you walk a few minutes in one way or another you will undoubtedly find something else worth exploring, which is such an awesome thing about our city.  We're looking forward to what our next opportunity to explore might have in store for us!