Hey, Southern California - you're beautiful, but man, your traffic sucks. Bad!

And the weather twists continue. Both Seattle and San Francisco were sunny and warm when we visited. Our day in LA? Cloudy and rainy. Rain in July made the news. Really. So, a little abbreviated day, but we got what we wanted.

Before we drove (crawled...) to LA, we spent some of the morning exploring out lodging for the night. We stayed aboard the Queen Mary docked in Long Beach. The old beauty has been restored largely to it's 1930's splendor. Staterooms serve as your hotel room and the rest of the ship is a splendid throw back museum that you get to stroll around, tour and just basically absorb. This kind of thing really trips my trigger - seeing things this old that were state of the art in their day and still rock it style-wise but are also 'wow' in the fact that they are nearing 100 years old and man, how did they make this thing go with technology like that?

We slept in to a decent hour, grabbed some breakfast, did a little touring of the ship, watched a little Catalina Water Ski racing from the deck (it was was happening in the harbor by the ship) and then jumped in the car for another drive (ahem, multi-hour crawl...) to see some LA sights.

Stop #1 - Pink's Hot Dogs. 75+ year-old curbside hot dog stand. Amazing food, and classic show biz - signed pics of all the stars that have eaten there on the walls. Great stop.

Stop #2 - The Hollywood Walk of Fame. Yeah, cheese-ball, but the girls were really wanting to hit that up. We strolled for maybe a half mile and then...the rain began. We stuck it out for a while but the rain kept on coming.

Stop #3 - the Hollywood Sign. Yeah, cheese-ball again, but had to do it. Got some pics and then...the rain picked up even more.

It was then decision time. Mid-afternoon, radar showing rain coming for hours, and all our plans were outside. We chose Plan B and headed for San Diego to get a head start on tomorrow. Pretty light on the pictures due to the rain.

- Jim