Over winter break I visited more than The OC. I also took a trip with Lindsay to Los Angeles. We came up with a great day trip that would take us to a real Russian submarine, the world's best hot dogs, and tar pits.

The Russian Submarine

The first place we drove out to was the Long Beach docks, home of the Queen Mary and now a real Russian submarine.

Admission to the sub wasn't very much, just $8 or so. After ogling at the gift shop full of Soviet memorabilia, Lindsay and I watched a very cheesy movie about the submarine. After laughing at the less-than-stellar acting, we boarded the ship.

I just want to point out how much I look like Tom Clancy in the above picture. That's not a good thing. Once inside the vessel, we saw this sign.

Rest assured that I tried every lever, button, and wheel that I could find. Sadly, most of them were bolted down. The one thing they did have in full operation was the periscope.

Here's what we saw inside the lens.

After we had looked at it, a Russian guy came up to us and showed us that we could in fact turn the periscope 360 degrees. I then found it necessary to target my brother's old car. Let's be honest, that thing really deserves to be destroyed by torpedo.

Here are the quarters of the political officer. They aren't quite as spacious as the Hunt for Red October would have you believe they are. They also tried to do the room up with Russian books and newspapers. The quarters of the other crew members were similar, but lacking supposed political paraphernalia.

At either side of the submarine are the tubes for launching torpedoes.

Before we left, I convinced Lindsay to lay on one of the beds. There's no telling how many diseases she picked up from doing that.

On a technical note, I thought I would mention the inaccurate name of the submarine. The exhibit calls it the "Scorpion", which struck me as odd. I didn't see why the Soviets would name a submarine after an arachnid as common in Russia as it is in Michigan (I checked). It turns out I was right. The real name of the submarine was the B-427. It got the name "Scorpion" after it got passed from owner to owner in the West.

Pink's Hot Dogs

Lindsay recently heard about how awesome Pink's Hot Dogs were from a few of her friends. She then saw a special about it on the Travel Channel, so it was clear that we had to go check out these supposedly awesome hot dogs.

When we got there we were quite hungry. We walked up to find the line stretching around the corner. It took a half hour to finally get our food, but it was well worth it.

Here are our dogs. We each got an Ozzy Osbourne dog (spicy Polish dog, nacho cheese, American cheese, grilled onions, guacamole & chopped tomatoes) and I got a Guadalajara dog on top of that (relish, onions, tomatoes, topped with sour cream). Here's how they looked.

Here's what happened to them.

The Ozzy Osbourne dog was especially difficult to eat, as the toppings fell all over the place. I actually liked the Guadalajara dog much better. I even tried to recreate it at home, but it wasn't nearly as good.

Pink's is famous for all the celebrities that eat there. They have autographed pictures all over their walls, if you're into that sort of thing. I personally will be going back for the hot dogs.

The La Brea Tar Pits

I've been wanting to go the tar pits since I was a kid. My dad claims he took me, but if he did, I was too young to remember it.

The tar pits are a really unique place for extracting fossils. See, the geography at this very place in LA is such that tar comes out of the ground and forms pools. This pool of tar caught mammals of all sorts in it that used to roam the Los Angeles area and preserved their fossils in near perfect condition. Unbeknownst to me, there used to be mammoths, saber tooth tigers, mastodons, camels, and even lions in the Los Angeles area. At some point or another, they all met their fate in the gurgling tar pits.

Inside the building I was elated to learn that I get into the museum for free because I'm a teacher. To be fair, I did show my entire slide show to my students and tell them about it (they loved it). One of my favorites is the California saber-tooth tiger.

Also impressive is the American mastodon.

The prize exhibit, though, is the Columbian mammoth.

Check out the teeth on this guy.

As we were leaving the museum, we took note of this extremely accurate piece of the time line on the wall.

Yes, Jesus, Columbus exploring, and European settlement all happened 2000 years ago. I'm serious. Check your history books.