Venice Beach

Yesterday morning the four of us drove up to Venice Beach and had breakfast on the strand.  It was a bit cool in the shade, but we got to watch everybody walking by.  The kids observed:

• Almost everybody has a bike or skateboard
• There's a lot of dogs
• Some people appear a bit crazy.

The weekend booths were setting up, and one just seemed to have middle aged men acting crazy.  Clowns without the costumes.  It was entertaining, but later, as we walked around, on two occasions one of them approached Lou and said something non-nonsensical.  During breakfast one of the guitarists started playing.  In the picture below, the guy just off Zack's left shoulder was the most weirdly active.

Breakfast

Lou and the kids walking on the beach while I stayed on the strand.

We walked on the strand for about 30 minutes, checking out the sites (Zack: "What's 'hand blown glass?'")  It wasn't crowded yet.  It started getting a bit warmer, so we went back to the car to get our stuff and headed to the beach.  Zach went right out and AJ sat with Lou for awhile.  Here's Zack gettin wet:

Lou and AJ (to the right of the pink tent)

I think that's Zack out by the breakers just right of center

Yep - that's him standing up out there

 We hung out on the beach for about 2 hours.  Once AJ went in, they stayed in the water the entire time.  At the end we found a beach shower and had the kids clean off, then took a quick walk back up the strand to look for performers.  We found 4 guys doing somersaults and big jumps on the strand.  They had a funny shtick about how they were criminals who could be out robbing your houses, but they were entertaining you instead.  They did lot's of aerials and leaps over each other.

The crowed "Wow"ed!

 Their finale was to line up 10 people (including "One Tall WHITE Guy") from the audience, then jump over all 10.  

Lining up the people to be jumped.  The tall kid on the left and the the two on the right are part of the act.

Lou caught a picture of the guy in mid-air doing a flip.  He ran up from the left and jumped over the crowd.  The guy on the end is part of the group and had to duck pretty low to avoid a hard collision - which he did.

From there we saw a crowd out near the beach so walked over to see what was up.  There was a small skateboard park and a local shoe company had sponsored a skating competition for handicapped skaters.

We watched for about 30 minutes, then headed back home, sunburned and a bit tired.

For dinner we went to the Big Wok.  It was crowded!  The kids were familiar with the concept (large buffet of uncooked food - choose your ingredients and have them fry it up).  We headed home tired.