September 2, 2021
We are starting our West Coast trip in Long Beach, just south of Los Angeles. It’s not a city that we have spent time in before but we like what we’ve seen so far. We are staying in Belmont Heights, a quiet neighborhood of Californian bungalows and Spanish style houses.
Down the hill from us and near to the beach is Belmont Shore, where the houses are closer together but just as Spanish.
We saw some beautiful doorways.
And some cool classic cars.
We walked along 4th Street, which appeared to be where Long Beach’s hipsters hang out.
One store had some topical t-shirts
And a vintage portable turntable that we liked.
There were more small apartment buildings in this part of town.
But plenty more bungalows and casas
This guy creeped us out peaking over the fence.
We finished up the walk, by ambling along the bluff that overlooks the beach.
Just offshore are a number of man made islands that look like some sort of giant movie sets for a futuristic movie. In fact, they were constructed in the 1960s to house oil drilling derricks and equipment that were built to tap into the Wilmington Oil Field just offshore. Architects designed the islands to hide the oil drilling apparatus from those onshore by adding trees, fake buildings and even waterfalls. The islands were named after prominent astronauts of the time. The island in the photo below was named Island White after Ed White who became the first American to walk in space on June 3, 1965. Tragically, he died two years later in a fire during pre-launch testing for Apollo 1.
There are a number of apartment buildings and large houses lining Ocean Boulevard that follows the bluff.
We came across a navy memorial that looked familiar. In fact, it is an exact replica of the sculpture called The Lone Sailor, that was created by Stanley Bleifeld for the United States Navy Memorial in Washington DC. Apparently, there are about a dozen such replicas scattered throughout the country.
Mal and Lauren 