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Back in March while attending the #WeAllGrow Summit, I had the opportunity to spend a full day with the the Long Beach Convention & Visitors Bureau. Prior to visiting Long Beach for this conference, I wasn’t very familiar with the area and truthfully it never was a location that I thought to visit. Being in town for the conference plus spending the day with their tourism board has totally changed that. Long Beach is absolutely beautiful and has so much to offer.

We stayed where the conference was being held, Hotel Maya. There aren’t enough words to describe how much we LOVED this property. The property is large and has some awesome amenities. The pool and hot tub area have cabanas, a bar and is waterfront. We dined at their on site restaurant, Fuego, multiple times as well as spent some time at their hookah lounge. The view from our balcony was was breathtaking!

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Our day with the Long Beach Convention & Visitors Bureau started with a sail along the Long Beach coastline aboard one of Harbor Breeze’s modern and comfortable catamarans. It was an awesome way to see and enjoy Long Beach’s downtown waterfront.

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We then hopped on a bus to head to The Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) where we got to check out a comprehensive retrospective exhibition by legendary Los Angeles artist Frank Romero, encompassing over 50 years of the artist’s career. His work has powerful and meaningful messages behind them.
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From there we headed to the The Aquarium of the Pacific which is the fourth most-attended aquarium in the nation! We started off with a delicious lunch and then had a super fun Behind-the-Scenes Tour. This aquarium displays over 11,000 animals in more than 50 exhibits that represent the diversity of the Pacific Ocean. We were able to feed the fish from the back room and just see how everything operated which was really cool.

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The day ended with a helicopter tour!!!!  Anthelion helicopters took us on an amazing adventure over the storied Queen Mary, the historic USS Iowa Battleship and the spectacular Catalina Island. This was my first time in a helicopter and it was one of the best experiences.

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While we did do a lot in just one day, when visiting I would absolutely break these activities up between two days so that you are able to walk through the museum as well as the aquarium at your own pace and take everything in. I also highly recommend a tour of  Queen Mary which is considered one of the most haunted places in America! Click HERE for some additional recommendations on what to do while in Long Beach courtesy of TripAdvisor.