My partner and I knew it would be a very hot Saturday (7.15.2023) in the SGV so we decided to head to a beach city. We decided on Ventura, an hour's drive away on a good traffic day, but this time, it took about 85 minutes or so. When we left South Pasadena, the thermometer on the car said it was 88 degrees, this being around 11:30am. By the time we reached Woodland Hills, the thermometer said 104. Yuck. When we got to Ventura, the weather was perfect, a nice 72 degrees.
Mission San Buenaventura, founded in 1782 by those rascally Spanish colonizers. But of course the native Chumash people have been living in the area for at least 10,000 years.
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Photo by me
When we're in Ventura, we know to eat here. They must have the best mole in all of California, I kid you not.
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My partner's mole negro.
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My mole amarillo.
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I guess the X Games are in town, because we kept seeing advertising for it everywhere.
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Photo by me
Ventura City Hall, which originally was the Ventura County Courthouse, built from 1912-1913. It became the city hall in 1974. And incidentally, Ventura's official city name is actually San Buenaventura, but everyone calls it Ventura, and is denoted as Ventura on maps.
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I guess because of its architectural style and the palm trees, it looks like it could be the capitol of a fictional banana republic in a movie or something.
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A memorial mural dedicated to the old San Buenaventura China Alley, honoring the lives and history of the early Chinese pioneers of the area. China Alley, also known as Sui Mon Gong, running west to east behind Main Street off Figueroa Street, was a self-contained community of simple wooden buildings with shops, businesses and rooming houses that was home to a community of more than 200 Chinese settlers in the late 1860s. The community was removed by the 1920s as many of the residents had by then begun to disperse, returning to China or relocating to nearby Oxnard.
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No one was on the pier---because it's currently closed to the public, I assume because of some damage that it might've sustained during last winter's storms.
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The hotel used in the film "Little Miss Sunshine," though that was set in Redondo Beach and not Ventura.
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Photo by me