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Saturday, June 12, 2010

Hooray for Hollywood (Day 8)

Day out found us waking up in Anaheim only to brave the traffic to downtown Los Angeles. Yes...DOWNTOWN L.A. Good Lord! I thought the traffic was bad before...it was CRAZY that day!

Mom and I had made a reservation the night before for a tour of Los Angeles. It was to last six hours and hit all the "hot spots." Now, I don't typically like "tours" of this nature, but I KNEW after my first experience driving in Los Angeles traffic the day before that I was NOT willing to drive to all the places I wanted to see. So we booked a tour.

We were a little late to our pick up point, but no worries, because our driver was late as well. We ended up on the tour with an 86 year old lady from Florida and her 45 year old son, a mother, father, grandmother, and 4 year old little lady from Australia, and our tour guide, who was from NYC originally. I was actually quite impressed with the knowledge of random information this tour guide possessed. Sure he knew a lot about Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and Los Angeles. He knew a lot about California as a whole because he'd lived there for 12 years. But he actually knew a surprising amount about Florida, Australia, and Kentucky. While on the tour we all debated politics, immigration laws, taxes, the economy...you name it. So needless to say, it was quite an interesting tour. :-)

Anyway...

We spent six hours driving around Los Angeles. We got to visit the following places (and many more, but I can't remember them all): Griffith Park & Observatory where we also saw the Hollywood sign, Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Kodak Theatre, Beverly Hills (yeah, I took some pics of the famous people's homes, but I wasn't really interested in all that anyway, so they weren't very good pics), Santa Monica, Venice Beach, the Farmer's Market, and the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Needless to say we were very tired after the tour, but as soon as we got back to the car, we hit the road and headed North back towards San Francisco. We drove until ten thirty that night and I was completely tuckered out. We found a hotel in a little town called Solvang, and settled in for our last official night in California.

Anyway...I have to say this about Hollywood and Los Angeles in general...honestly...I wasn't that impressed. I guess I had it all built up inside my head to be something bigger/better than what it really was. Really, L.A. is just another city. You have your more affluent places (like Rodeo Drive and Beverly Hills) that are nice to look at and probably nice places to live, but then you have your flip side to those...your "bad" parts of town. L.A. seems to have a lot of those parts. The roads, the buildings, all of it were really run down and it just made me kind of sad. It wasn't the "dreamy" place that you think it will be from movies and whatnot.

Santa Monica was nice. I really, really liked it there. Venice Beach was pretty cool too. Griffith Park would have been nice to explore and there was an art show in Beverly Hills that I would have liked to just walked through for a little while, but there wasn't enough time. Everything else I wasn't very impressed with. :-(

Anywho...I'll post pictures on another blog. Promise. :-)

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