Catalina Island: Two Harbors Trip

Roughly Twenty-five miles out from the Los Angeles Harbor lies the rocky Santa Catalina Island. I don't know a whole lot about the island's history other than the fact that it has been populated for at least 8000 years.

When the first Europeans arrived in the 1500s, they encountered the Native Americans who inhabited the island. The locals called it Pimi and referred to themselves as Pimungans, or Pimuvit.

There are two major population centers on Catalina Island; Two Harbors and Avalon. After living for many years in San Pedro and watching the island from afar, we decided to hop on a ferry and go check it out!

Here we are, arriving at the Catalina Express, which will ferry us across to the island. The plan was to stay the night, spend the next day on the island and then leave on the last ferry back to San Pedro in the evening.

We didn't bring anything with us other than a couple of small bags containing swimming gear, a change of clothes and toiletries of course!

Be back tomorrow night, LA Harbor!

Apparently, we were lucky to be able to get one of the very few available rooms in Two Harbors. From what I remember, this is the only hotel in town. It is not surprising, though, once you've been there.

The place was not exactly swarming with tourists. Keep in mind that Amanda and I like to travel off season!

Once we got settled into our room, we went ahead and had a walk around. To be perfectly honest, it looks exactly like everywhere else around LA where you can manage to find nature. Dry and mostly brown with palm trees and small shrubs with various selections of cactus growing around.

Oh, and there are lots of boulders, stones, rocks, gravel and dirt.

This photo of Amanda pretty much sums up the level of excitement that we experienced on our trip. This is not to say that we didn't enjoy ourselves. To put it another way, Catalina as a fantastic place to take a nap and get some peace and quiet!

More rocks! But these ones are wet. So exciting!

The scenery is quite relaxing. I think Amanda found it all to be a bit depressing, though, being from such a green country as England. You can't expect it to be so green around here, considering it rarely rains.

Speaking of England, this turned out to be a good time for Amanda to give her dad a call. I can always tell when her mind is wandering, because she can always be found on the phone with her dad or sister.

At least it was a nice day. The sky was clear and the clouds were fluffy. Fluffy is good.

Here I am with my awkward in-between hair growth while standing next to what I later discovered to be a dead, severely rotted seal corpse. I sure hope that it lead a good and happy life!

Here is Amanda again, sitting in another spot being bored. Sometimes I wish she could just relax! Her brain never stops.

Ah, now we're talking. Finally we made our way to the beach to relax and watch the ocean and birds for a bit.

Many Southern Californians own sailboats and yachts. Catalina is an awesome place for boaters to go on a day trip or quickly get away for the weekend. A good friend of mine who does 3D work in front of a computer all day makes the trip quite often as a way to completely unplug for a while.

I'm not sure what a launch area is (maybe I have to ask the guy in the little picture), but if I were a local, I'd probably go here to launch myself in the water and swim 25 miles to LA.

I know a few teenagers who live there and they all seem to say the same thing. Get me out of here! It's not so bad, though. I think if I were a kid on Catalina Island I could find all kinds of things to entertain myself.

Of course, I grew up in a very different time!