LA Baby...

After Kings Canyon we drove down to Los Angeles and stayed in a hotel near Santa Clarita. On Thursday we spent the day at Six Flags Magic Mountain to get some more roller coaster riding in. Since it was after Labor Day and a day during the week, the park was empty… probably 300 people in the entire amusement park, so we just walked on the rides with no wait. Needless to say we rode too many coasters in a short amount of time and ended the quite day dazed with headaches. There are decent roller coasters there, with one that can best be described as incredibly violent and extreme, hence the name, ‘X’ (for eXtreme). On the ‘X; your feet dangle and the seats are mounted in the side of the track rollers so as you go over a hill, the entire car rotates on an axis. Imagine a really tall coaster that does very sharp flips and rolls, except the car itself is rotating so you can be backwards, upside down or in motion at any point. It was probably the best roller coast we have both been on so we rode it a few times and called it a day.

That evening we drove down through the valley and camped in Malibu at a nice state park. On Friday we got a leisurely start and headed down through Santa Monica and met up with our friend Dylan (JMUer who recently moved our here from Virginia). We cruised the coast, enjoyed the weather and then went to a random concert at the Hollywood Bowl, an outdoor venue similar to Wolftrap in Virginia. Two classic 70s/80s bands took a break from their walkers to strut their stuff… “The Spinners” for some Motown’esque flavor, and then Daryl Hall and Johnny Oates. Going in to the concert we didn’t know who Hall & Oates were, but as it turns out we knew the words to just about every song with the exception of one, we just never knew who sang them. The crowd was a lot older than us, but we took a cooler full of alcohol, sandwiches and had a great time enjoying some 70s grooving in the nice LA weather.