3rd Street Promenade, Santa Monica

          I feel like I hear a lot of people talk about The Grove, shopping mall.  It’s located in L.A.  There are so many good malls and shopping areas in the Los Angeles area that are so much better so I wanted to talk about a few of them.  I recently went back to 3rd Street Promenade in Santa, Monica which is a pretty good shopping street and mall.  There are some others as well but the Grove pales in comparison because there aren’t too many good stores, it’s always very crowded, and parking is expensive.  Anyway, the layout of 3rd Street Promenade is very nice.  It’s a street with lots of stores and a big mall attached.  I’m pretty sure cars are not allowed to drive down the street where all of the stores are.  There is a garage that validates parking and lots of street parking all around it.  It has a combination of designer and lower-end stores.  Southern California has an insane number of malls, many of them very good.  I don’t really thing the Grove is worth the effort.  When we were at 3rd Street Promenade we stumbled upon this Sprinkles Cupcake vending machine.  I always used to see it all over social media.  We decided to try a cupcake because it’s so famous.  It was actually surprisingly really good.  I though it would be dry and old, but I tasted very fresh.