24 Hours in Los Angeles

Well, this was an unexpected detour.

Last week I got to travel to Australia for work. While I’ll be talking about my visit to Melbourne in a later post (protip: it’s pronounced “mell-bin”), my client and I had an interesting flight out there. Due to extremely rare thunderstorms in Los Angeles (in July no less), our first flight out of Cleveland was delayed three hours. This caused us to miss our connection (LAX -> MEL), and due to the fact our flight was only once a day*, we had to spend the next 24 hours in LA waiting for the new flight.

After finding one of the only free hotel rooms in LA (apparently finding a room on a Saturday night is an act of God), we then realized that our checkout was noon the next day. Our new Melbourne flight didn’t take off till 10:35PM, so we needed to find something to do that wasn’t sitting around LAX. After some Googling the next morning, we decided to check out the California Science Center. It was free, located close to other museums as well, and most importantly- it was inside. Once we checked out from Ace Hotel, we hopped in a Uber (our best friend for this trip) and headed the few miles to the California Science Center.

Since I was (technically) enroute to Melbourne, I had most of my photo equipment with me. This proved very handy as I got to capture shots of the Endeavor (recently located there via a crazy long drive through the LA streets) as well as cool parts of several other exhibits such as the shark tank. After we were done seeing all of the exhibits there, we wandered across the Rose Garden (!!) to the Natural History Museum.

“No Phil, I told you the In-n-Out was on the left!”

The Natural History Museum had both the “token” dinosaur skeletons/fossils but also some exhibits about the local history of the Los Angeles area. Combined with a rare gems exhibit and a technology exhibit (which featured a 1st generation iPhone), we had plenty of cool things to gawk at. Once we were done wandering, and after an unsuccessful attempt to find The Habit, we took an Uber to the airport (stopping along the way to eat dinner).

Next up: a 15.5 hour plane flight to Melbourne, Australia (not a typo).

*Our LAX->MEL flight is the #21st longest flight in the world according to Wikipedia. One of the new United routes that is: less than a year old and uses the new 787-9 Dreamliner. It was one of the nicest planes I’ve ever flown in and thankfully we didn’t have any battery issues!