Jon's Travels: Long Beach California

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Destination: Long Beach, CA
Duration of Stay: 4 days, 3 nights
Cost: $54 at Beacon Inn, $53 for AirBnB, $37 for Aquarium and Harbor tour, $37 for Queen Mary and Russian Scorpion

I left about 11am from Pinnacles to head down to Long Beach. I had mentioned that when I was in Pinnacles I was completely cut off from the world (no cell phone coverage, no WiFi). As such, I added a little bit of time to my drive since I was more or less guessing to head south without my phone to guide me.

I reached LA at the best time possible (4:30pm, the start of rush hour). I made a decision that while I was there, I would try to check out the Nerdist (Chris Hardwick) at the NerdMelt Theater. I was able to find it, and find a parking spot, but found out the tickets for the show that night were sold out. Defeated, I decided I would head down to Long Beach, find a park at the beach, and just camp out for the night.

Failure part two: it is illegal to park overnight at the state, county, and city parks in the LA area. Well, shit. Time to check if there are campgrounds near LA. Not really. Well, I guess it is time to check for a Hotel. Drat, pretty expensive. I ended up going on Priceline and found a pretty cheap motel call the Beacon Inn.

Now, the Beacon Inn was an interesting experience. Priceline had the place at $45 per night. Well, this excluded the 15% tax, as well as a $2 fee for using a credit card, and a $5 deposit for the key. All this was explained through an inch thick piece of glass, with no holes for sound. This meant I heard everything through the slot for the credit card. When I got into the room, I threw down my stuff, hopped on the bed, and flipped on the TV. Static. Changed the channel. Static. Changed the channel. Porn. Turns out, in order to access the normal stations, you need to turn on the satellite first. Like I said, interesting place.

The next day I decided to hit the Aquarium of the Pacific. They had a special where you also got to take a harbor tour. I spent about three hours at the Aquarium before running to get lunch before the harbor tour. I took a lot of pictures, but a lot didn't turn out. You can see all of them here.

Penguin feeding time!

Jellies are the coolest.

Also know as the "Finding Nemo" exhibit.

You could feed these guys. One person had them covering both arms.

We could touch these guys. Pretty cool.

The harbor tour captain was very knowledgeable and pretty funny. He talked a little about the history of Long Beach and some of the other attractions on in the area.

Nice public park.

Sea plane!

The Queen Mary

These guys sleep all day, and hunt all night.

Cranes loading a cargo ship. With LA and Long Beach harbors combined, it is the 3rd biggest harbor in the world.

After I finished up with the harbor tour, I walked to the lighthouse to try and set up my room for the night. I sent a message to some from AirBnB offering a couch for the night. The issues was that I was giving pretty short notice and I was brand new to AirBnB. Normally they want you to have referrals from your friends, or people you have stayed with. I decided I would give them a while to respond and I would go check out the Queen Mary.

The Queen Mary was a transport ship along the same lines as the Titanic. It was repurposed in WWII as a troop transport, which earned it the name "The Grey Ghost". It went back into service after the war, but eventually took up permanent residence in Long Beach as a Hotel. You can tour it, but you need to buy a ticket for the tour. They had a few different ones, but mine was "Ghosts and Legends". It was more or less a haunted house. You got to see the first class swimming pool, as well as the boiler rooms. Their size was astonishing. No photos during the "Ghosts and Legends" tour though.

Very fancy hotel

I also saw the Russian Scorpion. It was a Russian spy sub during the Cold War. It was very tight quarters, manned by kids not much younger than me. I am hoping they were at least a bit shorter, because I was hunched over most of the time. All the photos can be seen here.

One of the more "spacious" quarters.

The mess

Aft torpedo tubes. There were more in the front.

Docked next to the Queen Mary.

After dinner, I still hadn't heard back from the person I contacted on AirBnB. I was starting to get a little nervous, so I thought of plan B: sleep in a Wal-Mart parking lot. They normally allow this, but alas, the Wal-Mart in Long Beach had a parking deck, not a parking lot. I decided to go with plan C: pick someone else on AirBnB who was a little more than I wanted to spend, but could accommodate me for the night.

I looked and found Wendell's condo in Cityplace Lofts. Very nice place to sleep, very accommodating (he responded to my request in 10 minutes), and a very interesting guy to talk to. If you are in the area, I would recommend his place if you want to go the AirBnB route.

Day three of my visit was a nice, lazy one. With all the excitement yesterday, I wanted to take it easy. I woke up kind of late, ate some of the fruit Wendell had left out for me before going off to his interview, and walked down to Long Beach. I walked along the beach for about an hour before deciding to hope in. I was blown away by how cold it was! Wendell said that the beach, unless it was an El Nino year, was fed by an Alaskan current. There goes my plan of swimming all day.

Later in the day, I drove down towards Huntington Beach, but ended up at Bolsa Chica instead. I lounged around in the sun for a bit, walked the beach, and generally just took it easy. The beach was more or less abandoned except for the one lot of RVs and around time for sunset.

Classy lunch :)

After sunset, I met up with my friend Jonas from elementary school. We hadn't seen each other in six years, the last time being at his High School graduation party. We went to dinner and chatted, got some groceries and chatted, drank a little and chatted (joined by his roommate and another friend), and chatted a little more. We stayed up until 2 am talking. We woke up and had breakfast before I took off. I had a blast seeing him again and hope we can meet up again, in something much shorter than 6 years.

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On the way back to Marina, I took the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH). This is a really beautiful drive. I don't have too many pictures, since I was driving and didn't want to hold my phone up while trying not to drive off the side of the mountain. I made three main stops along the way at Malibu, El Capitan State Park, and Morro Bay. I didn't anticipate the length of this trip because my GPS kept routing me away from PCH since it adds about 3.5 hours to the journey. I made the last 60 miles or so, which was driving on the mountains right next to the ocean, in the moonlight. If you enjoy driving, that is a really fun road. If you hate driving, it might give you a heart attack. It reminded me of the road to Hana on Maui, except it was better paved and a little wider.