Soaking up the atmosphere around Santa Monica

Summary
LA is vast and sprawling, with so many things to do. But often these things are a little underwhelming – trips to the Chinese Theatre, seeing the Hollywood sign, downtown LA . . . all a bit meh. Whereas strolling around in the afternoon in Santa Monica was cool, and would be my recommendation for a place to stay for a first time visitor
Staying in Santa Monica was a small part of a whirlwind road trip around the Western US states. See the itinerary and tips for this adventure here – Rapid 2 week roadtrip around the US West Coast States
highlights

#1 Walking along the beautiful beach walks all along Santa Monica's shoreline

#2 Santa Monica's beach itself

#3 The Santa Monica Pier - worth wandering around for the fun and iconic nature of the place

#4 The Route 66 memorabilia - Santa Monica Pier is the end of the famous route
Experiences nearby

The below map shows experiences nearby with a colour that reflect the Overall Score of those experiences
Score Detail
Background - how many times have you asked someone what a travel experience was like and the response was "amazing" or "awesome"? That response is nice to know, but it makes it hard to differentiate that experience compared to others. That is exactly what these scores are trying to do - differentiate the experience by giving a score out of 10 based on 6 categories and then giving an overall experience score
This overall experience score is calculated by: take the highest of the "Culture" or "Nature" score (1-10) + "Fun factor" (1-10) + "Avoiding the crowds" (1-10) + highest of the "Unique" or "World Famous score" (1-10). Then convert into a score out of 100
Extra detail - the logic being that I find all of the 6 individual scores important, but I don't want to mark an experience down just because it doesn't cover both "Culture" and "Nature", or because it isn't both "World Famous" and "Unique". Take the examples of Safari in The Serengeti and walking through Rome - they both appeal at opposite ends of the nature / culture spectrum, and you can have a fantastic time without needing to appeal to both sides. So, their overall scores aren't penalized for their lack of one or the other, and I've done the same for "World Famous" vs "Unique". But . . . I do think that the "Fun factor" of an experience is important, irrelevant of other factors, and so is "Avoiding the Crowds" (or where there are crowds that add to the experience). So, both of these scores are standalone