Urban Jungle

Moving from the 3rd largest city in the US to the 2nd largest, I expected that I would be getting more of a lot of things.  More traffic, more smog, more people, more money (earned and spent), more sunshine, more professional basketball teams, more celebrities, more homeless people, and well, you get the picture.  One thing I was not expecting more of was nature.  I was actually expecting to move to a larger city and get less nature to account for the more of everything else.  LA has pleasantly surprised me by being a place that is FULL of natural beauty and outdoorsy activities.  Who knew?



About a month ago I was looking for beach volleyball leagues or groups to join and I stumbled upon this website called meetup.com.  Meetup not only had a group for people who want to play volleyball, but groups for people who want to drink wine, go on hikes, go on ski trips, even people who want to watch the Bears!  Basically, people can plan an activity and send it out to other group members who can choose to go to the activity.  I joined a few groups related to my interests and have been really active with my hiking group.  Check out Meetup, it is worth looking into just to get some new and different activities on your social calendar.  If I had known about it in Chicago, I would have joined some wine tasting groups at least.

Anyway, last Saturday I met up (haha) with some people from my hiking group for an AMAZING hike in the Santa Monica Mountains- just about 10-15 minutes North of my house, a short (and gorgeous) drive up PCH.  I must say, as a former resident of Colorado, my expectations were totally exceeded:

LA is shaping up to be the city that has it all.  Any place that can facilitate me hiking a mountain and taking in a wonderful beach sunset in the same weekend is okay by me:

Visitors welcome anytime :)