Nearly Free Los Angeles December 21st, 2009

Some days you want to visit a city and spend as little money as possible.  You’ve all seen the travel books extolling various famous cities for fifty dollars a day ($50 a day in Paris, $50 a day in London).  Perhaps you haven’t seen such books, but for a while they used to be everywhere, and it made me think about what there is to do in Los Angeles inexpensively or even free.  There’s lots of activities in L.A. that will cost you money.  Theme parks, trips to Catalina Island, whale watching, and so on.  But where do you go when you don’t have that much cash in your pocket?  First, I recommend you check into a Los Angeles cheap hotel, and then shake out the piggy bank for a few coins for the following trips:

First, I’d recommend the Los Angeles County Museum on a Thursday night.  The main exhibits are free after five p.m. until closing as a kind of service to the community, and it’s well worth it.  Also, while many parking meters in the city have raised their closing hour from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m., many remain at the 6 o’clock cut off.  Search for one of these for cheap parking.  Then you’ll be able to wander around works of local and international art to your heart’s content.

In keeping with Museums, I’d travel over to a side street on Bundy Drive (somewhere around the intersection of Bundy and Santa Monica Boulevard may work) and park your car, then take a winding bus ride up through Brentwood for about seventy-five cents on the Big Blue Bus, or a dollar twenty-five, for the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit bus, to find yourself at the Getty Center, a world class museum perched high above Brentwood, overlooking Santa Monica Bay and Los Angeles simultaneously.

To complete the museum theme, I’d make my way over to Griffiths Park Observatory, which has free parking, and an excellent newly refurbished museum (reopened within the last couple of years after years of renovation).  Wandering about the museum is free and you’ll see a number of dazzling items, including an actual TESLA coil in operation, and a spectacular display of the planets, which shows your relative weight on each of the eight worlds in our solar system (and, I believe, Pluto, too).  If you want to see the planetarium show, it will cost about seven dollars (the last time I checked), and it’s well worth it, providing a context for everything else in the observatory.

Related posts:

1. The Possibilities are Endless with a Car in New York
2. The Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art
3. Boston Offers Family Night Out
4. Two Parks of Bangalore
5. Travelling Through Singapore

• Posted by Cliff
• Tagged Travel