Long Beach

We spent our last full day in LA at Long Beach where we toured the Queen Mary and visited the Aquarium of the Pacific.

We thought about staying on the Queen Mary as she is now Hotel where all passengers stay in first class cabins even if she is a 3 star hotel. The ship is certainly showing her age although she was certainly the height of luxury in her day.

John did think of putting in an offer as he is still looking for as boat, and he did look good on the deck but the price of $3,500,000 thirty years ago puts her outside his price range.

A short, free, bus ride away from the Queen Mary is the Aquarium of the Pacific. We found trying to travel on busses, for anything but very local journeys, very difficult in LA. The Long Beach Passport free bus service was great, with frequent, well used buses cutting down the already huge volume of traffic.

The Aquarium was our first experience of the joys of being a senior, over 55, in America. We got a good discount on the entry fee. Having recently visited the amazing aquarium in Plymouth we were eager to see how they compared.

The Long Beach aquarium has huge tanks with an enormous range of fish, presented in an informative and entertaining way. We were in time to see the fish being target fed by divers in the tanks, while sharks swam innocently by. This little fish walked over the sand of his tank to check us out and we thought he was rather cute.

The octopus looked rather unpleasant but had a great sense of colour.

Although this is a spectacular aquarium, we both agreed for once that the new marine aquarium in Plymouth was even bigger, better and more fun.