Saturday, November 1st

Today is our last day in LA so we tried to get lots of things done. We didn't get as much as we wanted, but we got some of them. We started out by going to another farmer's market and a mall. It was a really nice farmer's market and mall. One of the stores was an American Girl store. I have heard about them, but I had no idea that a store for a doll could be that big! My mom has told me that once Samantha was old enough, she is going to buy her an American Girl doll. We went in to look at the Samantha doll. We decided to get one of the dolls that looks like her when she is old enough.

After the mall we went to the LaBrea Tar Pits. This is a museum that sits on top of a bubbling tar pit.When the tar pit was originally found, there were millions of bones of various animals stuck in the mud. There was a hands-on exhibit that we could try to lift a pole stuck in tar to help us understand why so many animals got stuck and died.The museum has lots of skeletons for the various animals that were found in the tar there.
After we left the tar pits we went to an area of downtown LA called the Toy District. This is an area where all of the little "shops" had toys for sale for very cheap. We wandered for awhile until we wandered into a neighborhood that made us very uncomfortable. We all got a little bit of a wake-up call while in downtown LA. There were a lot of homeless people. A lot of the population is Hispanic. I learned what it felt like to be in a minority.

All in all we had a great time. 2 weeks is a long time to be gone, so we were glad to be home. We had great weather while we were there. It was in the 80's & 90's with no rain until the afternoon before we left. You can look at a lot more pictures of the vacation on our pictures website pictures.stoufer.com