Redondo Beach

On Friday, the boys and I went down to Redondo Beach to have lunch with Sophie's camp class and to check out the sites. I'll be posting this week a bit more about Communicamp, the fantastic camp that Sophie is attending for two weeks, but today I'll just entertain you with our adventures.

The camp sat on a bluff overlooking the pier

View south from the pier

We dared to enter The Great White Shark Exhibit, paying $1.50 for a tour of a taxidermied sixteen-foot great white caught off the west coast approximately five thousand years ago. Our tour guide was a suspiciously earnest balding woman who also manned the cash registers where strange tourists purchased an assortment of shellacked shells and samurai swords. The boys, naturally, thought the place cool.

The entrance to the exhibit

After the educational tour, we walked to the pier, an old-fashioned, wooden one where the boys and I goofed off.

Then we ate a mediocre lunch at a local tourist trap that looked deceptively attractive as it hung over the water but turned out to be a lot more than shabby. A seagull landed on the ledge right beside our table and proceeded to join us as we ate, a flopping small fish in his beak. I would have taken a picture, but it happened so suddenly and he was so close that it was all I could do to swallow my own bite.

Every Hour is Happy Hour!

All in all, Redondo Beach pier appeared to be a  time capsule. The only difference, I imagined, from what it looked like fifty or more years ago was probably that the blonde California surfers and bikinied chicks had been replaced by hordes of Latino families -- the new face of California.