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| July 3-5 - First Annual 4th at Long Beach (Part 2 of 4) | ||
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< Back to Trips Once in Long Beach, the "real" fun began... after checking into the hotel,
I made up a plan - go downtown and check out all the rides and whatnot,
and then check out the beach. I ditched the stuff I brought in the room, locked up the truck, and walked into town down
the beach, and proceeded to have a great time! |
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| Part 2 -Day 1 in Long Beach | ||
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I didn't stay in the hotel very long... just long enough to carry the
stuff up to the room, figure out what room I was actually in, and then it
was off to town, which was about a mile away... I chose to walk along
the beach instead of using the roadway... This was the view of the hotel from the top of the dune at that back of the beach... A long spit formed primarily by ocean currents depositing silt from the Columbia, Long Beach stretches on for a whopping 28 miles of unbroken sand, making it America's longest beach. |
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Being a Coastal Beach open to the Pacific, it sees its fair share of Sea
Life, and combing the sands is sometimes interesting...
On this day, I found a couple of Jelly Fish, which apparently got too close to the surf...
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I also found a log with an incredible amount of small clams attached to it... apparently, they were too small to dig into the sand, and instead anchored themselves to the log with their 'foot'... | |
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I made a beeline for the "Yearlong Carnival", which oddly only runs in the Summer... |
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Long Beach really is quite impressive... its quite flat, with a gentle
slope, which makes it great for walking... they allow vehicles on the
beach too, though, so at times you have to be careful. I stopped at Marsh's Free Museum, which is both a store, and a museum of local lore... not to mention, home to the World Famous Jake the Alligator Man! |
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With Clippings of the "Half-Alligator, Half-Human" from the Enquirer and the Star behind him, Jake is
on prominent display in the museum.
The story is that no one really knows exactly what Jake is... except that he's OLD, and he doesn't have kids running around in Florida! |
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The majority of the museum, though, is old music boxes, garnished from the
saloons and halls of the region over the years...
The impressive thing is that they all work still, some more than 150 years after they were made! Oh, and yeah, I'm hoping you don't notice the new hair style... :-) |
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The craftsmanship was incredible, especially when you remember that back
in the mid-to-late 1800's, when these things were being created, the
West was little more than a gaggle of pioneer towns... back when it
really was the "wild west"! The one below had an entire band... a 96-pipe organ, a xylophone, drums, and, of course, a working, self-playing piano... all run on compressed air that worked from a bellows system... it was quite impressive! |
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| Nearly every space is taken by SOMETHING... |
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I stopped at "The Lighthouse" for dinner and had some fairly decent
seafood... actually, it was quite good! How could it not be... it
was right on the coast! I was also treated to an impressive sunset, over the water... NICE |
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I walked home in relative darkness, along the boardwalk.
I was greeted by the skeleton of a whale that washed up on the beach
several years ago... Also on the walk home, I got to watch some fireworks go off... it was the 3rd, but all up and down the beach, folks were shooting some of their loot... a pointer of things to come! It took me about an hour to walk back, stopping here and there to watch the display, and it was still going when I got back to the hotel... |
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