LA beach towns

Day 2 in LA was all about checking out the beach towns.
Venice - The canals are still fun to walk through, eventhough there are even more giant monstrosities along the banks. Abbott Kinney Blvd has a huge number of expensive maternity stores, wellness centers, and furniture stores, so it's lost more of it's funkyness. Stroh's Deli is still there, so we grabbed lunch. I had an exotic fried chicken and black forest ham sandwich. Yummy!
Santa Monica - We made a brief foray down Main Street. It has a few new buildings with a few new stores, but nothing worth mentioning. We stopped at the Library Ale House for an adult beverage, and it was good. We then hopped on The Big Blue Bus and got out of there.
Redondo Beach - We never spent much time down here before, but we cruised down the PCH to meet a bunch of pregnant people for dinner. It was fun, but all those pregnant peeps are scary.
Hermosa Beach - We ended the night with a walk around the pier. The pier itself has been renovated recently, so it's pleasant. The party joints around the pier were rockin' but we're too old for that stuff.

Return to LA

First fun trip back to SoCal since the move. It just took my experience at LAx to remind me why I was eager to escape. Flight time to LA: 55 minutes. Time from landing to car rental: 90 minutes. Such a freakin' waste.
So far the old hood is pretty much the same. Some things are cleaned up a bit. The parking lot at the Venice pier is getting a new restroom. Yippee!
Hinano's still makes one of the best burgers in the world, and it's still as divey as ever.
I drove by our old apartment and house and both are still standing.
We also checked out the new hip downtown Culver City. Ford's Filling Station proved to have excellent California cuisine, good service, and a more subtle LA crowd. There was even a small selection of craft beer on tap which included Firestone Double Barrel and a very Sierra-ish Ford's Pale Ale. After dinner we stopped by Vinum Populus to play with their cool wine dispensing apparatus. Plug your card in, push a button, out comes your wine, and then drink and repeat. Fun!
That was day 1, more to come later.

First test of email post

This is just a first test of a post sent through email. If it works,
it'll be cool.