Days to 280 to 284, Two Wee Devils in the City of Angels...

Los Angeles, the City of Angels has been fabulous. We have squeezed so much into our five days, this entry covers the first four. Our drive back from Vegas took us through the Mohabe desert. We started the road trip with the hood down, but we had to pull over to put it up and put the air con on, as the temperature was over 110F. Phew, now that is hot!

LA conjures up images of Hollywood and the rich and famous. We had made a list of things that we wanted to do and started off our sightseeing with a guided tour of the stars homes. Surprisingly, you get a good view of most of the houses in the Beverly Hills and Bel Air districts, as only a few (like Tom & Katie Cruise and the Beckhams) have security to the point that you can only see the gates. Some of our personal highlights were Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman and Cameron Diaz, not to mention Hugh Hefner's Playboy mansion!!! (The pool party was fabulous, but no cameras allowed). Obviously we totally respect the privacy of ‘stars’ and think it is really naff to sit on an open top bus with camera’s poised and a loud commentary blasting, letting the passing pedestrians know all about what you’re hearing, but what the heck, when in Rome and all that!!

Hollywood Blvd is the home of the walk of fame, this is a collection of over two thousand stars set into the pavement with the name of a person who has made what is considered a great contribution to the arts. They are separated into five categories, film, television, music recording, radio broadcasting and the theatre. It was interesting to learn that the stars have to pay $7500 for their own star and only one has ever been refused. The walk has spaces for new stars and these are spread out over the route so as all the “newbies” aren’t located in the same place! It is a little surreal walking the Hollywood walk of fame, we felt as though we were part of a movie. In fact most places in Hollywood tend to make you feel like this. We took loads of pictures of the stars, but these don’t really translate into interesting material for our blog, so we’ve only included one to give you an idea, Walt Disney!

One of the points of interest on the tour was the Comedy store, starting place for many comedians including Eddie Murphy, Richard Prior, David Letterman, Rosanne Barr amongst many, many others. We decided to see a show that night. The sets were 15 to 20 minutes for each comedian and 7 out of the 8 comedians were really funny. The other was useless!!! There were various themes to the comedy including the upcoming Presidential election & the Rodney King riots……see, comedy can be educational too! We did laugh a lot and really enjoyed out impromptu night at a West Hollywood icon.

Like most girls my age, I only know Rodeo drive from Pretty Woman movie with Julia Roberts. The road where she tries to go shopping in old clothes and the store assistants won’t help her. All I can say is looks exactly like the movie & I didn’t dare venture into any of the top end designer shops to test that stereotype. Not my thing anyway, I just loved walking down one of the most famous shopping streets in the world! We even managed to stop and chat to a real Beverley Hills cop! The streets in Rodeo drive, as with the rest of the Beverley Hills area are lined with tall palm trees and wide avenues. Most cars are top spec and it is not unusual to see Bentley’s, Porches and Ferrari’s around the place. I’m positive we saw lots of famous people but they all blend in so well to the surroundings we must have missed them! (Apart from the obvious ones at Hugh’s house that is! :-)

Grauman’s Chinese theatre is a Hollywood institution, a cinema on Hollywood Blvd, it is where some stars have made imprints of their hands and feet into the concrete stones outside the venue. It was fun spending an hour looking at all the names and messages. We stood in the feet of quite a few famous people, the pictures of us show Mike in the hands of Clint Eastwood, and me in Marilyn Monroe’s - she wrote Gentlemen prefer blondes, reference to her movie at the time. I kinda agree being a converted blonde, I wonder how long that will be for!!! Next door to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre is the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood. This is home to the annual academy awards, better known as the Oscars. The theatre is actually a shopping mall, a very glamorous one at that, but not what we expected. The new film with Mike Myers, “The Love Guru” premiered when we were in town and there were crowds waiting to pap the stars from early in the evening. There was also an awards ceremony at the Kodak theatre, we nearly managed to get onto the red carpet……..just not quite! Mike was very impressed at being given an oscar for his own staring role!

What is the next best thing to actually seeing a star? The Hollywood Wax Museum! Well not quite, infact it was a complete waste of $17 entrance fee. We thought we would spend at least a couple of hours in the museum, after a couple of exhibits we realized it was more likely going to be a quick 30 minutes. In our opinion, save your money and go to the best, Madame Tussauds. Part of the ticket for the wax musuem included a trip across the road to the Guiness World Records exhibit. This was interesting, but again not worth a detour of your plan for LA. We did get to see some old reruns of the BBC record breakers show so that was…….nice.

We wanted to take part in a TV show when we were in Los Angeles, the home of many TV networks. We couldn’t get access to “American Idol” so we had to settle with “The Late Late show” with Craig Ferguson, a funny Scotsman whom Americans have fallen in love with (I am told!). We arrived at the studio and were organized into rows, basically it took the form of the beautiful people being in row one, not so beautiful row two, you get the picture! Naturally, we blagged it into row one! Ushered to our seats at the front of the studio beside the producer and right infront of Craig, we learned the art of being in the audience of a Hollywood production! Listen Darlings, it is all about being “Show Enhancers” the warm up guy assured us. He was a very funny American comedian who explained how to laugh loudly, no quiet laughs were welcomed here!! He basically told us to laugh at every opportunity, even if the joke isn’t funny or to our taste! Well that in itself had us in hysterics & the pair of us laughed our wee socks off, getting a Thanks from the producer and Craig for sounding realistic!!!! The show lasted for an hour and had a couple of guests including the actress from Weeds and the lady from the Golden Girls, Betty someone. You would know her to see, I guarantee it, and sure if you didn’t, “Just fake it……we are in Hollywood afterall!”

We haven’t been to the cinema since June 2007, so when Sex and the City film came out, Michael insisted that we go and see it! Actually, it was all me & as predictable as it was, I caught up with SJP and all the New York girlie antics. Mike was a good replacement girl mate, for a night at least!

When you think of Hollywood what do you see in your mind? For me it was the Hollywood sign and arriving at night into LAX I was disappointed not to see it immediately. We were determined to get a close up view, so armed with a map from the local tourist information stand we headed through the hills for the sign. It actually used to read “Hollywoodland” when it was erected in 1923 as an advert for real estate in the area, however weather and landslides removed the last four letters leaving its legacy as HOLLYWOOD. The sign was somewhere you could climb up to until a number of people decided to commit suicide from one of the letters. The letters are each the size of a five storey building. The local government closed the access road to the sign and now have guards and electrified fences to ensure no-one can get near to the sign. There is even a $103 fine per person for breaching this. Is it worth it just to get up close and personal to the sign? We didn’t think so……the picture would just be us in front of a 5 storey white building!!

Universal Studios is situated about ten minutes drive from the Hollywood sign, this was next on our hit list. We arrived around lunchtime and parked, excited about what lay ahead. When we got to the ticket booth, we saw the various options ranging from general access, front of line passes and a VIP experience. We decided to go all out with the VIP experience, it is Hollywood afterall! To our disappointment, the last one had left at 11am. Not wanting to settle for second best, we booked our places for the next day, Saturday and headed to Malibu instead.


I have seen parts of west coast Los Angeles previously, but the things I really wanted to see again and share with Sarah were Santa Monica and Venice beach. After our trail run trip to Universal we headed there via Malibu, home to stars like Jennifer Anniston. They live on a private section of beach however, so we had lunch on the pier and then headed down to Santa Monica. The pier in Santa Monica is very famous and houses the Pacific amusement park, with a big wheel and rollercoaster on the pier. We skipped the high adrenaline rides and tried our luck at throwing hoops over bottles. Unfortunately we didn’t win, or fortunately from my point of view as I don’t know what we would have done with a 5 foot tall stuffed dog!!! Santa Monica has a great feel to it, really relaxed. There are quite a few homeless people there, but I can see why they choose a beautiful location like this to lay their heads at night. Santa Monica has a pedestrian area, the 3rd Street Promenade. This always feels busy with people shopping and eating at outdoor restaurants. It’s a great place to hang out and watch the world go by.

Venice Beach is a different cup of tea all together. One of the shops there is called the Tattoo Asylum, the location of where I got my tattoo eight years ago and Sarah wanted to see this amongst other things. I had told Sarah about Muscle beach, but I don’t think she really believed me when I told her how much the guys there love themselves. The look on her face when she saw them was priceless. They caught sight of her reaching for her camera and turned on the extra reps, how funny!!! Venice is a cool place, with a lot of street art and entertainers demonstrating their skill. There are many basketball courts too which were all in use. Venice is sort of a Byron bay meets Kuta, meets Haad Rin, meets Nimbin, anything goes!

So that is a rundown of our time in Los Angeles, this city of Angels was an incredible place for us wee devils, (read stalkers, shrekers & fake laughers!). We had mixed opinions on what LA would hold for us but we have both come away having fallen in love with yet another city and although this is a megalopolis and has its own dark side, it is somewhere we will return to and remember with affection.......watch this space!

Ofcourse we have only briefly mentioned Universal Studios. We haven't forgotten about it, though, since they gave us the VIP treatment, we thought we would reciprocate with a separate blog entry dedicated to our day there. Enjoy!

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