"A Night on the Town"

Last night I got a great surprise.  Dallas was a bum and played Xbox pretty much the whole day, so to make up for it, he told me that he was going to take me out for a "night on the town."  I was pretty excited to see what he had in mind.  First we went to Acapulco's for dinner.  Yum!  We splurged and ordered a Pineapple Upsidedown cake for dessert.  It was soooo good!  He wouldn't tell me where we were going next though.  We got in the car, got on the 5 North, and just started driving.  He did give me a clue that we would be going to LA and that I would need a jacket.  Needless to say, I had no idea what was going on.  When we got off the freeway, I immediately recognized the exit (and signs) as the same park we went to to see Christmas lights last year.  Apparently at this park they have tons of different things you can do.  During the day they run a Merry Go Round, pony and train rides, different shows, and so on.  I never knew there were so many cool things to do there.  So we started driving through the park, but Dallas couldn't find the right road we were supposed to turn on.  We eventually did find it, but discovered that it was blocked off and there was no way around it.  He was pretty bummed, because he thought we wouldn't be able to get to where we were going.  The only thing I could tell was that we needed to get to the top of the mountain, and it looked as though all the roads we could find that went in that direction were closed.  So as he was frantically searching for a new route on his phone, I sneeked a peek (is sneeked a word?? oh well...) at the destination and figured that it was an Observatory!  How cool!  I was so excited!  I don't know about any of you, but I am addicted to the show, The Bachelor/Bachelorette.  And this season, the bachelorette took one of the guys on a date to this very same observatory!  So it was a pretty cool surprise. We tried to find an alternate route through the park, but we didn't have any luck.  So we pulled up their website on our phones to see what directions they gave to get there. (Hooray for awesome iPhones!) The website had us go through a part of the city to get up the mountain, which was the complete opposite way we were headed.  In the end everything worked out and we had an awesome night under the stars!  Unfortunately, the only cameras we had were our phones, and since they don't have flashes we weren't able to get any good pictures.  It's ok, I just used some from their website :)  It's a really cool place with a beautiful view of the city.  And up high enough that you can see some of the night sky which is a rare occurrence for us Southern Californians.

They had a couple of telescopes set up on the front lawn that you could look through.  One was looking at Saturn and the other was looking at the moon.  It was so incredible to be able to see Saturn.  It wasn't like a close-up view or anything, just a small round dot about the size of an eraser on a pencil.  But you could see the rings around it and one of the moons.  Apparently Saturn has about 49 moons so it was cool to be able to see one of them.  The guy was saying how the image we were looking at was like 8 hours old.  So crazy to think about.  It was so neat because neither Dallas nor I had ever seen Saturn with our own eyes, just pictures.  So I was a really awesome experience.  The other scope was looking at the moon and that was so cool because you could see all the different craters and the edges of the moon.  It's crazy how big some of them were.  They were just little in the scope, but compared to the size of the moon, you could tell they were just massive.  It was so neat!  If you look at the picture above this, you'll see three domes on the roof.  The dome to the left has another telescope in, and we heard that the dome on the right has like a solar thing.  I can't remember what the guy said it was but he said that you could look at the different colors of light that come from the sun.  We'll have to go back during the day to see that.  But the telescope in the other dome is really big and it was also looking at the moon.  It was a much clearer image that the other scope we looked through. 

This is just a cool view of the city from up on the hill.  When you get above all the smoke and smog, LA isn't too shabby.  I kind of felt like I was up on the B looking down into Bountiful.  It was funny because one of the guides was saying that on some nights when the weather is really great and there isn't much pollution in the air they can see the Milky Way!  He was so excited talking about this and how cool it was.  I remember thinking about all the times I could walk out into my backyard in Utah and look up and see thousands of stars, including the Milky Way! I'm really grateful to be going home to a little bit cleaner environment.  Anyway, we had a great night!  Thanks, honey, for such a fun surprise!!