Day Off at Manhattan Beach

After five years of flying back and forth between Halifax and New Zealand, we've learned it's always wise to have a planned day off in the middle of all the laborious air travel. For the longest time, I have sat in LAX for hours on end, waiting for connecting flights of one form or another, completely unaware of the fact that five minutes down the road, is the wonderful Manhattan Beach.
    We had arrived in Los Angeles at 10:50 pm local time (2:50am AST) the night before so allowed ourselves a generous sleep-in in the Four Points Sheraton (or, "Our New House" as Charlotte puts it). We wandered about the hotel lobby for a bit, looking at all the options on the tourist board.
    There was plenty of cool stuff to do, but our 'holiday budget' dictated we use the 'affordable option',  and decided a bus ride to the beach was the best idea after all.
    By taking so long to mull over our options, we ended up missing the first bus out to the beach, but that gave us time to head across the road to the Starbucks in one of the neighbouring hotels. (We were served by a Maori guy from Taranaki - in Los Angeles - typical!).
    After an hour waiting in the beautiful West Coast sun, the bus arrived and took us to Manhattan Beach. Once there, we got our priorities straight and went for a champaign breakfast.

Mimosa's at Manhattan

Eggs benedict, waffles, french toast, grilled cheese, champaign & orange juice; the Jet Stars hit the shoreline. We headed down to the pier to check out the aquarium, pelicans, fishermen, volleyball players, roller bladers, surfers, paddle boarders, and other beautifully tanned Californian locals, ignoring white and pasty tourists like us.

After a very late night and more than two hours sitting patiently in the Cafe, followed by walking around the white sandy beaches in her sneakers, rather than on them in her bare feet, Charlotte eventually ran out of patience with her parents and insisted on heading down to the 'sandy part'. So, off we went... 

The pictures speak for themselves.

Glorious as it was to finally have our bare skin out in the atmosphere (following one of the longest, coldest Canadian winters in more than thirty years), the time came to return to the hotel for Charlotte (and Dad) to take a quick nap prior to heading to the airport at 7pm that evening.

    We grabbed the kid (who by this stage, was down to her tighty whities), rinsed her under the tap to relieve her of a ton of sand (which caused her to squawk a bit), then headed up the hill to the bus stop to catch a ride back to our 'New House'.

It was only a fifteen minute trip via the Manhattan Beach outlet stores, but one of us didn't manage to survive the trip.

I guess it's hard work jet-setting until 2am, then sun bathing all day at the beach. Next stop... LAX to catch our flight back to the land of the Long Flat White: Auckland, New Zealand.