Saturday (July 20th)
Today was the teams last day in LA. We have had a great time and today was going to be no different. As we spent the morning cleaning up and packing up, Jed and I made a quick trip to the dollar store for little LA Lakers note pads and the local donut shop (Sam's Donut Factory) and headed back for our last group time. We spent some time just reflecting about our week and sharing what stood out to us the most. It was a great time together.
After our time together, we all hopped in the big van and the smaller SUV for separate excursions. Jed & I took Scott, Katie, Aaron, Alice, & Terri for an adventure around LA. Our first stop was a lego exhibit called The Art of the Brick where Dave and Shalom meet up with us. The exhibit was in Glendale at the top of a mountain overlooking the city in a place called Forest Lawn.
The exhibit was really cool and we had a great time checking it all out but in typical museum fashion, no pictures allowed. But I was able to find these online!
The craziest part about the exhibit was the location. Forest Lawn is not your typical place to go to visit art exhibits, it is a cemetery. The entire experience was pretty crazy! There were tons of places to explore at this cemetery that had other art exhibits. We had hear that they had a replica of the Last Supper that we were all excited to go see. (I mean, really, we are already hanging out in a cemetery, might as well see all that they have...) As we were going to find The Last Supper Window, we ended up finding a replica of David. At first we just jumped out of the car to take a quick picture of him but then we ended up exploring the area a little more and found The Mystery of Life statue. It was just amazing all the art that was all around us here!
The crazy part about the Last Supper replica was that it was in a the Great Mausoleum on the grounds. But we all decided, "Why not." and off we went. The Great Mausoleum was pretty wild to see. There were tons of sculptures all around and different areas throughout that were designated for families only. As we turned a corner there was The Last Supper Window and it was beautiful. They had chairs for people to set and just hang out so all walked in and just sat, sat and thank, reflected, sat in almost total quiet. It was really neat experience and something completely unexpected when we started off today.
I am pretty sure we could have spent most of the day there looking at the view, other art exhibits, sculptures and many other things but it was time to check out some more of the city. So we picked up Eric & Audrey and headed downtown for lunch to a famous place called Philippe. It was a really fun dive that we all enjoyed. We all sat and ate, shared pie, stories of the week and just had a fantastic time.
We were right downtown with Chinatown just a few blocks away, a craft fair (we learned later) and a ton of food trucks but we just didn't have enough time to do everything so after saying good bye to Shalom, we all hopped in our cars and continued heading south and west to Manhattan Beach.
This week we have spent almost all of our time on the east side of the city and only a few hours at a beach, so we decided to go check out a beach area. We walked around the shopping area, headed down the pier, found a very little aquarium, walked along the boardwalk checking out the ridiculously huge homes.
We didn't get must time before we stopped in for out last Jamba Juice, said good bye to Dave, Eric and Audrey and headed back to Hope to pick up our stuff, the rest of the group and head for the airport.
Greg, Michelle & Elisabeth Larson and Dave all surprised us and were at the church to say one last good bye to everyone. It was a mad dash of packing up vehicles, last minute cleaning and quick goodbyes. We made one last stop on the way to the airport, Zankou Chicken.
It was sad to see everyone go. We dropped everyone and all the stuff off at the door and we headed to turn in the large rental SUV and pick up something much smaller for the two of us to drive around in for the next few days.
After saying good bye to everyone, Jed & I headed out to his sister's place for the night. We spent the evening hanging out with our nieces and just catching up with them and all the things they are doing.
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