Huntington and City Walk

 Tom took me to the Huntington Botanical Gardens.  These gardens are vast! There are more than a dozen gardens on 207 acres.  The picture above is from the desert garden.  Having lived in the desert I expected to know a lot of the plants, but on the contrary, I was amazed by all of the cacti and other plants that grow in the desert.  I love this picture above with the coral color cactus and the flower blooming from it. 

I wanted to kind of show parts of the desert garden, but really you only see the palms.  It still shows how pretty the gardens are. 

The desert even has it's own starfish.  :)  I had no idea there were plants like this.  I only included a few of the pictures because really this blog could go on and on with pictures of the garden.  I was just amazed by the variety and vastness.  I liked to touch the different types of plants--very interesting.  Tom thought some of them might be poisonous--not a good idea to touch them.  Luckily we were both ok. :)

They had a Lily Pond area with a variety of coy fish--very pretty and unique.  I liked this sculpture of the child--so sweet.   

The Japanese gardens were closed, but this shows a little bit of the cherry blossom tree blooming and this cool trimmed tree.  This was very common in California--these trees that were trimmed.  I really liked them.

They had a Chinese Garden which was beautifully done.  Tom said it was fairly new.  It's called the Garden of Flowing Fragrance. 

I wanted a picture of the Pavilion behind us with us in it, but evidently I didn't explain myself.  So instead I have a nice hat.

I love these flowers!  I think they are called Delphinium.  They remind me of a children's story I have about this women who goes all over the state of Maine and sprinkles these flower seeds so the whole state blooms with these flowers.  (As you can tell I don't remember the story well, but I did love the flowers. :))  The lighting wasn't good, but you can still get the idea of how beautiful they were.

Just before we headed out we went into the Huntington mansion and Art Gallery.  This room is the library.  You can see the books on the back wall.  The chandeliers in each of the rooms downstairs were beautiful.  We only had a few minutes in the house because I had wanted to spend all of our time in the gardens.  The weird thing about the Huntington is they have very short hours.  The day we were there it was only open from noon until 4:30.  We got there after 2:00 and were able to see most of the gardens, but we both would have liked to have looked at the other things they have there.  It will have to be on another trip.

After the gardens we headed to something called the City Walk.  It is like walking around New York's Time Square with all of the lights.  There are lots of different restaurants, stores, some live music, lots of people, and loud music playing throughout.  They even had a huge screen playing music videos. 

Tom's favorite baseball team is the Dodgers.  They had a big store with a lot of different Dodger's paraphernalia--quite expensive.  Tom was looking at a sweatshirt that was $100.00.  This picture of Tom was free and he's so cute! :) 


We ate at a yummy Mexican restaurant.  We had been going all day pretty much.  I didn't feel tired until we sat down and then it just kind of hit me.  I think it hit Tom too or else he felt it before and didn't say anything.  We had dinner and then headed back to the hotel.  It was a very fun day!