One Day in Los Angeles with Kids
We packed up the van on Easter and drove to Los Angeles early Monday morning. We were only stopping through on our way to Legoland. I packed some boiled eggs, snacks, and drinks for our trip.
I stopped in Burbank at Porto’s Bakery, everyone was still pretty much asleep in the car. They open early, but it was already 10:00 and there was a huge line which went quickly. I picked up ham & cheese croissants, a chicken empanada, a beautiful fruit salad, a fruit tart, and a triple chocolate mousse for $19. I love this place!
We drove past Warner Brothers’ Studios which we toured on a different trip.
We drove to Mullhullond Drive to the Jerome Daniel Overlook Park (also pictured above). Amazingly, we drove right in and scored a parking spot. There are about a dozen spots, and most of them were taken by huge tour busses. We ate our breakfast here. We hiked up a staircase and had a beautiful 360-degree view. When we got back to our car, we noticed several groups walking down the hill, probably because they could not secure parking in the small lot.
It was a brief stop along our way to the La Brea Tar Pits which was a few miles away. Because we booked the hotel in Carlsbad with a timeshare presentation, we had a late check-in of 4:00.
We drove down Hollywood Boulevard and passed by Mann’s Chinese Theater. The twins remembered walking through the area on a previous trip.
We tried to find street parking, but it was only available until noon when there was scheduled street cleaning. The tar pits are fenced in, but you can see them from the street. There are several pits which you can view for free by walking in the park. But we also wanted to see the museum which has admission fees ($16 adults, $8 kids).
We are members of the Lowell Observatory which allows us to visit other science museums for free. This is our fourth museum and we are hoping to visit two more before our $60 passes expire in September.
We don’t have a dinosaur museum in our area so we have been wanting to visit the La Brea Tar Pits for a while. The amount of exhibits here is impressive.
So many animals have been caught up in the tar pits. The above exhibit allows kids to try to pull out of the tar. The five year-old couldn’t do it.
The museum had a few movie theaters but we didn’t catch either of them. We did get to see scientists combing through microscopic artifacts in the onsite lab.
For lunch, we went across the street. There were a collection of food trucks. Tacos, falafels, vietnamese, there were like eight or nine trucks parked along the street. All with crowds of people.
We finally decided on filipino food. It was the best meal we had on our trip!
We shared three combos, one chicken adobo burrito, and two rice bowls, $12 each. It also came with three drinks and three orders of lumpia.
We walked back across the street where there were tables in between the La Brea Tar Pits and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
The five of us couldn’t finish all of our delicious food. We put the leftover rice in the fridge of our hotel and later ate it all.
I had planned on going to the beach at Carlsbad, but the kids wanted to run around the lawns at the museums and we never made it to the beach which was right across the street from our hotel.
Tomorrow we go to Legoland:
