26 Miles Across the Sea

Santa Catalina is a-waiting for me.

Downtown Long Beach

We are on a short trip to Southern California where Leo will run a 50 mile race on Catalina Island on Saturday.

We flew out of Vancouver on Wednesday morning, arrived in Los Angeles at noon and caught the Metro to Long Beach.  Did you even know there was a metro in Los Angeles?  Well neither does a large portion of the population of L.A.  We were practically the only white people on the system.  Unlike in the rest of the world, in L.A. the middle class does not use the transit system.  But for $2.75 for me and 1.75 for Leo as a senior citizen, we traveled from the airport to our motel in Long Beach in the same time as it would have taken a shuttle van at a fraction of the price ($50 for the 2 of us).  That's your budget travel trip for the day.

We're staying in Long Beach because this is where the ferry to Catalina Island sails from.  It reminds me of either Penticton or Dallas Road, only much bigger and with way more homeless people (true of all American cities, in my experience), and with way more houseplants growing outside:

There's high rise apartments and hotels lining the shore, but the streets were very empty during the day, the residents presumably at work, and the hotel guests all at Disneyland?

Later in the evening we went to the supermarket and the streets were busy with people walking their dogs and buying their groceries.