Lovely Laguna Beach

Picturesque is the word that comes to mind when I think of Laguna Beach.  I hardly even wanted to blink and miss a fraction of a second of the beauty that this location had to offer.  Magnificent!
 

The Wax Museum

I would definitely urge anyone headed to the LA area to add the wax museum to their list of must see attractions.  I was amazed at how very realistic most of these figures looked.  It was a cool spot to snap some selfies!

 

Can We Talk?  Well, I can...but Joan, not so much.  Too soon?

Uncle Bruce, did you say that you first met this guy at Shawshank?  Only kidding - this is Uncle Bruce with Actor Morgan Freeman.

Hollywood

A big Thank You goes out to Uncle Bruce for braving the traffic to escort Priscilla and me in to the heart of Los Angeles to catch a celebrity homes tour bus and for taking such good notes of which house belongs to which celebrity.  It was a great day!

During our more than 2 hour bus tour we saw the homes of more than 40 celebrities.  This first home belongs to Jason Statham.  He's a 47 year old actor whose salary allows him to live high atop a hillside overlooking LA.

This home was used in the filming of Lethal Weapon 2.  It's mainly glass and sits on stilts atop a canyon.  In the movie it is destroyed but in reality it's home to some millionaire.

This is the guest house of Quentin Tarantino (director, producer, screenwriter, and actor).  His main home was not visible from the road but I can only imagine its beauty.

Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel call this home.  An armed guard at the gate makes sure no unwanted visitors show up at their front door.

This photo cracks me up.  It looks one of the photos back from my Private Investigator days when I sometimes had to hide in the woods to get video.  I assure you that I was not stalking Paul McCartney when I captured this shot.

Justin Bieber began renting this strange looking place for a mere $59,000 a month just a couple of months ago.  Hopefully he can get along better with his neighbors in this neighborhood.

For any Hunger Game fans out there like myself, this is where President Snow (Donald Sutherland, Father of Kiefer Sutherland) calls home.

This home was used in the filming of The God Father.

Pat Boone resides in this mansion.  I especially love the license plate on his Rolls Royce - APRIL LV, for his hit "April Love".

Jackie Collins resides in this lovely shack.

Here's the hotel used in the filming of Pretty Woman.

The Beverly Hilton is where many of the awards shows are broadcast.  It's also where Whitney Houston took her final bath.

This is the very largest home in all of Los Angeles.  It belongs to the late Aaron Spelling.

Behind these very doors is the bedroom where the King of Pop Michael Jackson died.

Shirley Temple's place.

This is where Simon Cowell calls home.  I wonder if he's mean to the workers like he's mean to some of the contestants on X Factor.

Larry King's home is magnificent.

And last but not least here's the house used on Charlie's Angels.  It too sits high atop a hillside overlooking the busy city.  Right now some young spoiled kid calls it home.

A close up shot of the Charlie's Angels house.

And what should you expect to see next time?  After our interesting tour of celebrity homes we visited the wax museum.  Bruce, Priscilla, and I were amazed at how lifelike these life-size figures looked.  There were actors and actresses, singers, athletes, super heroes,...  I'll leave you with a photo of Uncle Bruce and Julia Roberts.  Be sure to check in again soon for many more.

La Brea Tar Pits

During my fabulous five day visit with Uncle Bruce and Aunt Priscilla I snapped more than 500 photos of the awesome sites we saw.  Instead of posting one enormous entry of all the fun we packed in over the 5 days, I'm going to break my California adventures down to several posts.  Here goes with our first adventure.

 

On my first full day we headed to the La Brea Tar Pits.  It's the site of the worlds only ongoing urban Ice Age excavations.  The museum holds more than 1 million Ice Age fossils from more than 650 different species of animals who quite literally found themselves stuck in the tar pits. Oh, and by the way, the remains of one early human was found there years ago as well.

 

Inside this museum we were able to view a lake that continues to bubble with asphalt and methane, two active excavation sites, paleontologists at work, and fossils found on that very site.  This first photo are actual bones and animal body parts preserved in tar.  

 

A Paleontologist hard at work.

404 of the more than 1,600 Dire Wolf skulls that have been excavated from the pits

Every now and then a new "Baby Tar Pit" (as our Tour Guide called it) pops up on the grounds of the Tar Pits.  This one was in a grassy area.  I'm pretty sure I could have escaped from it had I stepped in it, but just to be safe I kept my distance (I don't want to be part of the display at the museum).

Here's a sneak peek at what's up for next time.  We took a narrated bus tour of celebrity homes and famous sites in the area.  Although we didn't come face to face with any A-Listers, we got to see their houses (or in some cases, the front gate that closes their mansion off to ordinary folks like us)!

Night Flight

How cool is this shot I captured on my iPhone last night as I departed Phoenix headed to Minneapolis.  The kids were excited to have me home and surprised me inside the airport before I even made it to baggage claim.