The every-twelve-minutes Blue Line light rail ends here, which makes Long Beach attractions particularly accessible to transit travelers like us.

Aquarium of the Pacific

Outside: Shark Lagoon, where kids can gawk at big sand tiger sharks and touch little zebra sharks; Lorikeet Forest, home to the rainbow lorikeet bird; the Ray and Tidepool Touch tanks. Inside: more than twelve thousand ocean animals in the Northern Pacific, Baja Pacific and Tropical Pacific galleries. Look at our trip stats pages and you'll see what word-of-mouth among teachers has done to the number of aquarium trips we book. (One cautionary note: teachers should expect to meet many, many colleagues here if visiting in May or June.)

Museum of Latin American Art

Step off the Blue Line at the Fifth Street station, turn right on Sixth and walk fifteen minutes east. Presto: you've arrived at MoLAA, the only museum in the western U.S. to feature contemporary Latin American art exclusively. This well-run museum can provide combination tours and workshops to visiting school groups. An especially good destination for South L.A. schools close to the Blue Line.

Queen Mary

Take the Blue Line to the Pine Avenue stop in Long Beach, ride coastward on the Passport Shuttle "C," and you're practically at the foot of nine stories and eighty-one thousand tons of ocean liner. The Queen Mary can provide tours, and the kids (and grown-ups) adore the views from the deck, but teachers must consider an important caveat: what do you teach here? A visit to a ritzy ocean liner just doesn't fit well with anything in the elementary school curriculum. We'd visit more frequently if it did.

Rancho Los Cerritos

A century and a half ago, John Temple – yes, that Temple, as in the street – built a sprawling adobe here to headquarter his cattle biz. Today the rancho is an unbeatable place to show kids how the well-to-do lived back in the days of carretas, molasses casks and tallow vats. Tours by appointment. The Long Beach Transit 51 can get you here from the Artesia or Willow Blue Line stations.

Long Beach Museum of Art

For inner city kids, the strongest attraction of this admittedly small seaside art museum may be the breathtaking ocean views from next door Bixby Park. The Passport A or D will get you here from the Blue Line's Transit Mall station. LBMA can provide school tours, and, if so inclined, groups can walk to the beach afterward.

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