I didn’t set out to spend time exploring Long Beach, California. In fact, we only ended up there at all because I accidentally booked the wrong flight to Los Angeles. It was a day earlier than our LA to Fiji flight, so we ended up needing to spend about 24 hours in the Los Angeles region.
LA and the cities around it are a pretty large region, and traffic can be horrible, so if you only have a short time it’s best to only focus on one part of it. After finding an affordable room on the Queen Mary for that night (about $80), we decided to focus on Long Beach, and were really happy with that decision in the end!
The Queen Mary
This ship is one of the few survivors of her kind. The Titanic, as we all know, was sunk by an iceberg. The Lusitania and the Carpathia were torpedoed by Germans in WW2. Even her sister ship, the Queen Elizabeth, caught fire and then was capsized by efforts to put out the fire in 1972.
We stayed on the Queen Mary while in Long Beach and were very happy with that choice. For the price of a pair of “First Class Passport” tickets, we were actually able to stay aboard a room on the Queen Mary and more-or-less have free reign to explore the ship between check-in and check-out time!
The first evening we enjoyed our welcome drinks at the bar and then headed down to the expansive Engine Room so we could see it before it closed for the night. We also watched the 4D documentary (narrated by Iain Glen). What is a 4D documentary? Turns out it’s one in which you wear 3D glasses, but then they “add to” the experience by occasionally spraying you with water, rumbling the floor, poking you in the back, and (my favorite) releasing a spray of bubbles into the room. It was fun!
Afterward we had drinks and appetizers in the Art Deco Observation Bar, which used to be the first-class lounge of the ship. Then we stopped by the ship model gallery before retiring to our rooms. The Queen Mary was really luxurious in its day but keep in mind that it’s an old ship – the rooms are medium-sized and the walls are thin. The carpeting, bedding, etc. is a little dated. It’s not a five-star hotel, but it is really fun to explore and I think completely worth the price we paid for our room.
In the morning, we walked up to the Promenade Deck, where we admired the Christmas decorations and grabbed a quick breakfast at Midship Marketplace that we ate on the top deck, admiring views of Long Beach across the water. Then we explored some of the upper decks, including captain’s quarters, a shuffleboard court, a radio/communication room, and the navigation room of the ship. After we’d explored pretty much the whole ship on our own, we checked out of the hotel, dropping our luggage at bag check on the way out.
Pine Avenue
As we were ready for lunch and try to take advantage of fresh seafood any time we are near a coast, we took a Lyft to a well-reviewed sushi restaurant on Pine Avenue. This area actually has a lot of great restaurants, breweries, and shopping, so be sure to check it out while you’re in Long Beach
One thing we also observed was that everyone we met in Long Beach was very friendly and relaxed, which didn’t match our stereotypes/expectations for people in the Los Angeles area, so that was a pleasant surprise!
The Aquarium of the Pacific
After lunch we walked down to the Aquarium of the Pacific. Since it was a nice day and we’d never been whale watching, we bought combo tickets for the aquarium and a whale tour, which was a pretty good deal.
There was plenty to see for people of any age at the aquarium. Touch tanks with moon jellies, a lorikeet forest, a shark lagoon… There are three main galleries: So. Cal/Baja, Northern Pacific, and Tropical Pacific, which feature animals native to the region. You can find everything from tropical reef environments to penguins and from sea otters to sea lions.
Seeing the aquarium – especially the Tropical Pacific gallery – was a nice introduction to the rest of our trip, too, since we were able to learn more about those habitats and learn some of the names of fish and coral that we would see later, when snorkeling in Fiji or the Great Barrier Reef off of Australia!
After a few hours exploring the aquarium (and stopping for smoothies at the cafe) we took the short walk over to the harbor to wait in line for whale watching!
Whale Watching
The whale watching tour was probably my favorite thing that we did in Long Beach! Being out on the water is always fun, and I’d never been whale watching or seen dolphins before. We saw several smaller groups of dolphins and then were able to see a whole pod of ~60 friendly dolphins playing in the wake of our boat (see video below), which was amazing!
Then, as the sun was beginning to set, we made it out to see a humpback whale and her baby. They breached and fluked for us a few times before we had to return, and it was incredible to see these creatures in the wild.
Our trip to Long Beach may have been accidental, but we really enjoyed exploring some of the main attractions it had to offer – The Queen Mary, great restaurants, the Aquarium of the Pacific, and whale watching! We were pleasantly surprised by how friendly everyone was and how much there was to do. I definitely recommend it as a long weekend trip, or a great stopover location if you find yourself accidentally booking the wrong flight to LAX. 😉