Discovery Science Center - Fun in a Rubik's Cube

In our house, helping with the homework is a job that Lori and I have split down the middle. I handle any English, Math, or French questions, and Lori takes care of Social Studies, Bible, and Art. The kids are on their own for P.E., but the subject that gets passed around the most is science. The standing rule for science is that whichever parent you ask for help first, will send you to the other one. Whoever gets the homework referral is stuck trying to figure out what laws of the universe have changed since we were in school.

This lack of scientific expertise in our family meant that we were all going in on a level playing field when we went to visit the Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana, California. For a family that tries to avoid bunsen burners at all costs, you may think that a science center would be a strange choice for a place to spend an afternoon, and you'd be right. If you've ever driven the I5 south of Anaheim though, you know the reason. It's the giant Rubik's Cube.

OK, it's not exactly a Rubik's Cube, but it's similar enough to get us to stop and investigate. The cube itself is hollow, but the main building is packed with all sorts of neat, interactive science exhibits. My kids, who usually share their parents disinterest in the laws of physics, were off and running almost as soon as we stepped through the door. Within five minutes my older two were lying on a bed of nails, learning the principles behind the distribution of weight. I decided not to join them, thus saving them from having to learn that there's a maximum amount of weight you are allowed to distribute.

The kids tore around the place, checking in to everything. They rode in a shack that simulates and earthquake (which felt more realistic than the time I was actually in one), they learned how to make tornadoes with air currents (because what kid doesn't need to know that), and they learned how to send smoke signals (technically I think they made cloud rings, but nobody tries to figure out what cloud rings are saying).

Smoke signals! I believe this translates to "Dad, I need a raise in my allowance!"

After exploring everything thoroughly on the ground floor, we made our way up to the second floor to check out the "Science of Hockey". There were plenty of things to do here like make your own play-by-play tape, test the sturdiness of some sticks, or throw on some gear and become a goalie. This was our favorite activity, as there was a giant video screen in front of your net where you could watch a player skate in at you, and then just when the player took a shot, a puck would shoot out of the screen. It's lots of fun, but let me give you fair warning: Whoever was responsible for setting up this exhibit, had a bit of a mean streak in them. Boys, if the player on the screen goes over to the left to shoot, you probably should crouch low and protect your own pair of hockey pucks.

Once I finished demonstrating my athletic prowess to my children (except for maybe the skating challenge, where I got my butt handed to me) we headed outside to try Dino Quest. In the area underneath the giant cube, the science center has built a dinosaur boneyard, and as researchers, you are on the hunt for fossils. You are given "research transmitters" (aka Harry Potter wands) and a card with a list of fossils for you to find. When you find one you are looking for, you wave your wand (err...research transmitter) at it and it records your find. Once you've completed your card, you can return to the research office and get a prize. Depending on what kind of admission you bought, there may be a small surcharge to do Dino Quest, but it was a lot of fun, and probably worth the few bucks just to walk around yelling "Expelliarmus!!" at anybody else who looks like they might have seen the Harry Potter movies.

We actually ran out of time at the Discovery Science Center before we ran out of things to do. That's OK because it gives us a reason to go back. The Boeing rocket lab wasn't even open when we visited, and the simulated rocket launch looks like it would be fascinating. Our ticket included a showing in the Discovery Theater, but my kids found the movie a little young for them, although they did appreciate a chance to sit in a comfy chair for a little bit.

As a change of pace from all the theme parks in Southern California, the Discovery Science Center is a great place to spend a day. The fact that there was never any "Can we go back to Disneyland?" requests should show that the exhibits kept my kids intrigued throughout our visit. The only problem I have with the science center is that it promotes learning about science at every turn. If my kids develop an interest in science, one of us is going to have to help them with their homework. I guess I'll just have to make sure I'm the first one they ask.

J. Paul Getty Museum - Angry Birds Vs. Culture

Let me start by saying that my kids are not anti-art. Well maybe the boy is a little, but both girls have artistic inclinations, and I can usually keep the boy in line with just a glance or two (although it's getting a little more difficult now that he's taller than me). I guess sometimes you just choose the wrong activity on the wrong day, and no matter how interesting the subject matter, it's going to fall flat. This was our unfortunate experience on the day we decided to visit the J. Paul Getty museum in Los Angeles.

We arrived in good enough spirits. We paid to park in the garage (amazingly the only cost of the day as the museum is completely free) and then caught the monorail up to the main site. It was a nice, slow moving ride up to the top of the hill where the museum is, and you get a great view of Santa Monica and West Hollywood to entertain you on the ride up. Instead of admiring the view though, I should have been paying attention, because somewhere along the ride something happened that sent our day at the museum in to a spiral.

I might have missed the change itself, but the attitude adjustment was apparent as soon as we stepped off the tram. The museum is a series of striking buildings, all of which scream out for pictures to be taken. I asked my kids to stand behind a wall that bore the name of the museum for a quick picture. At least that's what I heard myself say. Judging from the amount of resistance that I received, my body language must have translated the request into "Would you like to do six hours of math homework?" The howls of complaint attracted plenty of attention, and should have tipped me off to how much fun this day was going to be, but in my ever-optimistic mood I assumed that it was probably just a momentary conflict, and that being exposed to some of the greatest artists in history would more than turn around a rough start to our visit.

Silly me. Whatever time-space continuum we passed through on the monorail had done a complete demolition job on our children's attitude, and it wasn't reverting to normal any time soon. We started making our way through the museum, which is absolutely packed with fantastic exhibits by Monet, Degas, Van Gogh and Picasso. I could take up page after page here telling you about how amazing some of the art was, and what kind of impact it had on me. I'm pretty sure my kids could tell you that there was a bench in the middle of each room that they could sit on. I'm 100% sure that they could tell you all about the one room that didn't have a  bench in it, as it was almost cause for a mutiny when we paused for a second, leaving them with no place to sit. If my kids remember anything of the J. Paul Getty museum, it would be how comfortable the benches were.

Actually, there was one big highlight of the day for the boy. The museum will always be remembered as "Where he was the first time he completed Angry Birds". I doubt the kids noticed, but it could also be remembered as "The place that nearly gave Dad a coronary" from watching his son walk among multi-million dollar paintings without looking up from his iPhone. We must have been the security guard's worst nightmare, as whenever we changed rooms it looked like every "walk into the wall" scenario you've ever seen on America's Funniest Home Videos. You were just waiting for the boy to bounce off a Degas or walk through a Picasso. It's amazing how hard he can concentrate on shooting birds at pigs, but a 5,000 year old storage jar wasn't even worth a second glance (I should have told him he could throw it at the pigs. I'll bet he would have given it another look then.).

Eventually we gave up, but this time we weren't leaving without a souvenir. We made each of the kids pick a piece of art that they liked and stand beside it for a picture. The girls looked around a little and picked out a couple of pieces that they liked. The boy just stood beside the nearest painting (which happened to be Monet's 1873 Sunrise). Fine, we're done, and we made our way back down the monorail. As a last little piece of revenge, since we had left the museum earlier than planned we ended up right in the middle of LA rush hour, and it took almost two hours to get back to our hotel (#LessonsMorePainfulToTeachThanLearn).

It certainly wasn't quite the horizon expanding experience that we'd hoped for, but it's definitely not the museum's fault. The J.Paul Getty Museum is an amazing treasure, with its awe inspiring architecture only overshadowed by it's huge collection of art masterpieces. I'd love to go back some day and properly explore the museum (we only covered about half) but if our kids are with us, there's going to be some different ground rules laid out. There will be no sitting in every room, no Angry Birds, and we'll be walking up to the top. I'm not chancing whatever happens on that monorail again.

Hollywood Walk of Fame

It's one of those world famous places that you feel like you have to see once in your life. TV always makes it look so glamorous, but realistically, the Hollywood Walk of Fame didn't promise to hold much that would entertain my children. Looking at the names of people they don't recognize in stars on the ground didn't seem like a very promising way to spend the afternoon. Actually if I'd known how few names I was going to recognize, I might have pushed for a different destination, but I figured it was going to be wall to wall Harrison Ford's and Carrie Fisher's (I'm not tipping off my favorite movie series am I?). Those are the kind of stars that you step around with respect. When you hit a stretch of John Doe's, who I'm sure did something great to earn a star on Hollywood Boulevard but hold no interest to me or my kids, and then add in some large crowds and a really hot day, you're going to spend the day wondering if this was a very good plan.

In this case, getting there was indeed half the fun. Hollywood Boulevard is an interesting place. If you follow it off to the west, you'll end up in a beautiful part of Hollywood, with palm lined streets and multi-million dollar mansions. If you go east however, you end up in one of those scenes that they use in movies to represent "the hood". The route we took to get to the Walk of Fame, brought us in from the east, bringing us past drug dealers, prostitutes, and one guy who seemed to be protesting the presence of the lamp post he was leaning against.

There's plenty of parking available for a small fee around the Kodak Theater area (although that didn't stop me from missing it numerous times) and if you park in the mall lot you come out right in the middle of the action. This is the focal point of the walk of fame, as you are mere steps away from the Kodak Theater, Mann's Chinese Theater, Disney's El Capitan Theater, and about a hundred people dressed up in random costumes, begging you to come get your picture taken with them. There was a Batman, a Spiderman, a Transformer, and a couple of Marilyn Monroe's, one of whom was actually a man. There's a conversation that'll perk up an otherwise boring afternoon of sightseeing. I think it's safe to say that if Hollywood is the center of the world for movies, then Hollywood Boulevard is the center of the world for crazy.

We spent a while walking the boulevard looking for names that we recognized. I'd say I could put a face to every fourth one, but my kids only knew about one in ten (Thank goodness some of the Disney characters have stars or we'd have been screwed). I suppose we could have sprung for a map of which stars were where, but we weren't really interested in wandering too far (especially not towards the lamp posts in the east) and I figured that the big stars would be around the theaters anyways. I don't know how the spots are assigned, but the lack of names that I recognized was somewhat disappointing. Perhaps all the spots in the middle of the Boulevard were given to stars of long ago and we needed to stray further to find modern movie stars, but a long walk to find somebody's name on the sidewalk was going to be a tough sell for my kids, so we opted to stay close to the center section of the walk.

We turned to Mann's Chinese Theater with the hand and footprints of the stars in the cement. I found this a little more intriguing, partly because I soon discovered that I have bigger hands and feet than most celebrities (which I won't comment on here as my daughter reads this), but mainly because I recognized most of the names. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hugh Jackman, and Robert Downey Jr. are big enough names that I thought my kids might be interested. Alas, the portion of the sidewalk with these impressions in them has almost no shade, is very crowded, and seems to be the main location for tour wholesalers. We got about ten minutes of looking around in before we decided that there had to be somewhere around here that would better hold our kids attention.

Then we saw it. Right across the street from where we were standing was Disney's El Capitan Theater, and right beside that was the Disney Soda Fountain store. It's a cute little ice cream parlor with a look and feel from the sixties, but prices that are distinctly from this decade. Of course the pricing was irrelevant at this point, as my kids really needed a place to sit down out of the sun, and cool off, and since we're not the kind of family to pass up a chance to enjoy some ice cream, we ordered up a round of sundaes and dug in. I don't know if it was the respite from the heat or if it was a mental justification for spending a months worth of the kids allowance on four sundaes, but this was some of the best ice cream I've ever had. You could almost see the moods changing as my kids demeanor improved with each bite, while mine darkened as it became apparent that there would be no "Daddy line" forming for ice cream today, and the sundae that I was supposed to be sharing with my wife seemed to have been renegotiated to an 80/20 split, definitely not in my favor. Still, even after resetting everybody's mood, we decided that there was no point wasting all the good will the ice cream had earned us, so we packed up and headed back to the hotel.

I know I said that the Hollywood Walk of Fame is one of those places that you feel like you have to see once, but if you can manage to make the trip when your kids aren't with you, you'll probably enjoy it a whole lot more. If you have to take your kids, try to explain to them who the people in the stars are in advance. If that doesn't work, try to explain to them that you'll take them for ice cream at the Disney Soda store. Or if that doesn't work, try to explain to them why there's a guy dressed like Marilyn Monroe out on the street corner protesting against lamp posts. Let me know how that one goes for you.

Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles

I love Los Angeles. It's one of my favorite places to visit, and there's never a shortage of things to do there. It's a 24 hour a day kind of town that has everything you could ask for. You want excitement? They've got plenty. You want adventure? Opportunities abound. You want to get in to trouble? This is your kind of place, but what if you just want to get in some downtime and relax? Or what if you want something fun that will entertain your kids, but you've used up most of your budget visiting talking mice in Anaheim?

This calls for a trip to the Griffith Observatory. Opened in 1935, the Griffith Observatory is the centerpiece of Griffith Park, a 3,017 acre park that was donated to the city of Los Angeles by Col. Griffith J. Griffith in 1896. Col. Griffith donated the land to give something back to the city where he had made so much money in real estate investment (Of course if he thinks he made a lot of money in the past, imagine what 3,017 acres of land wedged between Hollywood and Glendale are worth today.). The land was donated with the requirements that it be made into a "great park" which would be "a place of rest and relaxation for the masses".

So rest and relax we did, to a point. The outside of the observatory may be one of the most serene places in Los Angeles. Perched on top of a hill, the vantage point provides amazing views of the Los Angeles basin, the city of Hollywood, and the famed Hollywood sign. There are lots of hiking trails to the southeast of the observatory which seemed to be well used by those whose idea of relaxation is to climb up and down mountains, and lots of grassy areas out front of the observatory where you could spread out and rest.

In fact the only non-relaxing part about the area, is the parking. There's not much parking available (although the little that's available is free) up at the observatory, and the few spots there are usually fill up very early in the morning. After the lot is full, you have to park on the side of the steep and winding road that takes you up to the observatory. I dropped the family off at the top, then went back to park and had about a half mile walk, which surprisingly didn't kill me, although I'll confess that I wasn't thrilled to find out my family had decided to wait for me up on the roof of the observatory, thus finishing my half mile hike with a couple of flights of stairs.

Before heading inside, we spent some time admiring the views and the grounds of the observatory. The grounds have been featured in many movies, perhaps most famously the final shootout scene from Rebel Without A Cause. The observatory was also the original landing point for Arnold Schwarzenegger's character in The Terminator. This gave me a chance to practice my Arnie accent, and the boy to try out some of his "Rebel Without A Clue" poses.

The observatory itself is loaded with interactive exhibits to keep everyone entertained. My kids favorites were the chance to control the observatory's telescope (it's never a good idea to turn over control of a multi-million dollar telescope to two sisters who aren't exactly known for working well together) and the models of the planets in proportional size (How did we ever find Pluto in the first place?). My favorite part was a set of scales, one per planet, which would display your weight as it would be on that planet. The ones you're looking for are Mercury and Mars. Stay the heck away from Jupiter!

Proportional planets - I'm understanding now why Pluto got downgraded.

The Griffith Observatory is a fantastic place to spend a day in Los Angeles. There's very few places that don't have any cost involved (the planetarium show is around $5 if you choose to go) that will still entertain my kids for more than ten minutes. Combine that with the great views of Los Angeles, the Hollywood sign, and the crazy people walking up and down the mountain, and you've got the perfect place to spend your time, especially if you're tired of spending $100 a day for theme park admittance. If you're looking for relaxation, this is your place. If you're looking for trouble, well they've got the exhibits pretty well bolted down.

Trying to steal the 340 pound meteorite.