We’ve just gotten another report on Flat S’s adventures. It seems that she’s still in the state of California, having a good time in Long Beach with Janice Harris and her family.
Now we’ll turn it over to Janice and her report on what Flat S has been up to lately.
After Flat S had such a nice visit seeing all the sights of Los Angeles with the Chan family, she made a brief stop with us in Long Beach. We were happy to show her around our neighborhood after the Chans showed her around Los Angeles. As Sarvi mentioned, Los Angeles is really lots of small neighborhoods making up one huge metropolitan area.
Long Beach is part of the greater metropolitan Los Angeles area, and has over 450,000 inhabitants. The city is 51 square miles–a big city by any measure. If you look in Wikipedia, we found that there are almost 50 distinct neighborhoods in Long Beach!
We live in a little part of Long Beach, and we were happy to show Flat S our neighborhood. We live in Belmont Heights. Our neighborhood is right near the water, so most of our family activities are water-related.
Belmont Heights is famous for a colony of feral parrots that live in the trees. We hear them squawking all the time. Apparently, there was a fire in a shop in Pasadena (35 miles away) in the 1980’s and the parrots escaped, and somehow nested in our neighborhood. There are hundreds of them!
Julia was happy to take Flat S on a bike ride to our Mom N Pop grocery store nearby where she enjoyed a Mexican mango ice cream treat.
Unfortunately for Flat S, Julia was not in the mood to share….
We visited the Belmont Shore area, home to tons of independent restaurants, stores, bakeries, bookstores, and more. Flat S definitely was interested in Julia’s Hello Kitty cookie, but again, Julia wasn’t sharing….
We took Flat S to the Naples neighborhood of Long Beach, and walked the canals. Naples has one of our family’s favorite Christmas activities–the Christmas Boat Parade. We stopped off at the fountain, and crossed the bridges.
We made a stop at Marine Stadium to show Flat S where the World Cup of Dragon Boat championships are held. Marine Stadium also has all kinds of boat races, including some events in the X-Games.
We brought Flat S to our beach bike path–a place for bikers, joggers, and walkers to enjoy the beach and get some exercise.
For her last evening in Long Beach, we brought Flat S down to the boat docks. One of Julia’s favorite activities is walking down the docks and seeing all the cool boats. She says someday she is going to buy her mom and dad a boat!
We did try serving Flat S a substantial dinner of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, but she still didn’t seem hungry. So, Julia finished off her portion.
We had to say “Bon Voyage” to Flat S. Julia is very concerned about her taking a trip by herself, but was assured that she would be picked up at the airport by a very nice family at her next stop!
We can’t wait to find out where S is headed and what she’ll do next! Thanks for hosting her, Janice.