Exploring Long Beach

On Sunday, Andrew and I explored Long Beach. He had to go pick up some flyers and buttons from a guy who lived there and I wasn't going to go with him at first, but he begged me to come and keep him company. If I did, he'd make a Boo Day out of it. I was really reluctant because every time I've been to Long Beach, I was always visiting a super shaaady area. That is what I thought of Long Beach: scary. But man, after some exploring...I'm glad I went! It changed my whole perspective on Long Beach. It is seriously pretty cool and very fun place to visit!

Traffic sucked getting there. We kinda wished Carmegaddon was still going on so that everyone would stay home and keep the freeways clear for us. Ha! Waaaay too many trailers and campers on the road. Everyone's going on their last minute vacation, I guess.

Meeting the guy was really cool. He talked about being in the punk music scene circa 78' (which is what Andrew is crazy about). Then, he talked to me about Disneyland, and what it was like to work there and how he loved working there (Eeee!). He was a really nice man and we both enjoyed hearing his stories.

After that, we drove down Junipero Street all the way down until we could see some ocean. On the corner of Junipero and 4th we found all these really cool shops. So we parked the car and walked around. We found Portfolio which was a pretty cool coffee shop inside, but Andrew wasn't impressed by their coffee.

Down the block were some vintage shops, a Japanese gift shop (where Andrew bought me a super cute night light of a panda under a mushroom), roller derby shop, book shop, and other specialty clothing shops. It was a pretty hip area.

I Yelped for a record store and found Fingerprints which was another shop on 4th Street (waaaay further down though, we had to drive). The cutest little coffee shop called Berlin was connected to it. They also sold books, magazines and vinyl toys.

After Andrew was done record hunting, we got hungry and I Google Mapped "burgers" and around the corner was Louis Burgers (rated 5 stars). Those stars were well deserved. Our meal was so yummy!

We continued our trek to the ocean and randomly took a left onto Shoreline and found perfect parking, right next to a huge ferris wheel. We only had enough quarters for an hour (stupid parking meters) so we tried to do as much as we could in that time. The sun was going down so everything was so colorful. I kept taking pictures with the Vignette Camera App on my phone. The effects are really fun to mess with.

The area we were in was called Shoreline Village. Tons of places to eat and lots of attractions. We walked down Rainbow Harbor, saw the lighthouse and the Queen Mary from afar. We also walked up to the lighthouse and tried to take pictures of the both of us but it was really hard. There were tons of skateboarders riding down the windy path from the lighthouse. While we were walking we watched kids in these huge air bubbles, floating on a pool of water. It looked so fun!

Thanks for a great time Boo!

More pix on my Flickr