Greetings from San Fernando

On Friday we met my parents at the La Brea Tar Pits Museum, which they had visited before but we had not. We saw the 3-D movie about how asphalt trapped the animals whose bones are still being discovered underground and took the walking tour of several of the pits, including one which has been excavated and restored for visitors plus another that's in the midst of excavation now, right where the nearby Los Angeles County Museum of Art wanted to build a parking lot but encountered fossils. The biggest things I learned were that there's not actually tar in the pits and that many more predators were found than prey. There were an astonishing number of dire wolf skulls on display.

My parents took us out to lunch at The Counter, a superb build-your-own-burger place in the street level of the SAG-AFTRA building across the street from the tar pits. They went to get ready for services while the rest of us tried to go to Griffith Observatory, but the road was closed at the top with lots of cars and limos around for reasons we were never able to discover. So we drove through the park's winding roads, then went to Bronson Canyon, home of Adam West's Batcave, which offers a wonderful view of the Hollywood sign on the far side of the cave. We came back to change clothes and went to a pre-Bar Mitzvah dinner at the Lebanese restaurant Carnival with my extended Los Angeles family!