Hollywood, Santa Monica and San Diego - Southern California

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Ian and Sandra finally arrived at our place on the 1st of November after the first two months of their world tour. So far they have spent five weeks in Europe and three weeks with Kate (Dan's little sister) in England and now they start the US leg of their tour. They arrived at a fantastic time too as Jacksonville Beach was hosting the annual Jacksonville Sea and Air Spectacular which is a two day air show featuring the ‘World Reknown’ Navy aerobatics team, ‘The Blue Angels’. Our balcony was a prime spot to watch the airshow and for two days prior to the show we had aircraft wizzing around our house. The Blue Angels in their F-18s often turned between our building and the apartment block over the road, so we had fighters hammering within a tennis ball’s throw of our balcony (yes I was tempting, but not that stupid). The day of the airshow saw our house absolutely packed with the friends we have made, and all their friends to come and enjoy the show, and I have to say they named it quite well - it was pretty spectacular. From aerobatic pairs of bi-planes, to wing walkers and then all varieties of military aircraft, it was a pretty impressive show. Having the 5 aircraft of the Blue Angels cruise past our balcony so close you could see the rivots on the planes was pretty amazing. Fiona has the hosting people down to a fine art, the Mimosas and drinks were running freely!

So after spending one hectic day with Mum and Dad it was time for Fiona and I to take off to the west coast for a break. Actually Fiona had a logistics conference in San Diego she needed to attend and Mum and Dad wanted to do a driving trip around Florida, so I took the opportunity to head across with Fiona and see southern California. Mum and Dad grabbed our PT Cruiser and took off early in the afternoon for Orlando and a visit to Disney World and we headed to the airport.

San Diego is definitely one of the more beautiful cities we have visited, and in many ways it reminded us of Sydney. In contrast to the flat long beaches of Florida, the San Diego coast is quite rugged with small beaches packed with surfers nestled in amongst the cliffs. Large homes dot the cliffs in the same manner as the eastern suburbs in Sydney and pretty much every other coastal town in Australia. To top it off, many of the trees within the city are Eucalypts and Moreton Bay Figs which have been introduced from Australia. No Koala’s though! Although it has a strong surfing culture (the surf here is pretty impressive) it is very much a Navy town. After the attack at Pearl Harbour, much of the Pacific Fleet is now home-ported in San Diego. The day we arrived into the city there were three air-craft carriers along-side at Coronado Navy Base. But there is more than one base here - in fact it took us nearly two hours and three attempts to find the base we were accommodated at!

The accommodation they provide here for their service people is amazing compared to back home - it is like staying at a hotel. They have a check in desk manned 24 hours a day with free DVD hire (and they are the latest DVDs). The rooms usually consist of a bedroom with on-suite, separate lounge and kitchen complete with microwave, stove refridgerator etc. These places are bigger than most one bedroom apartments! To top it all off, ours had a balcony overlooking the ocean, and within the first five minutes of being there we saw a Frigate and Aircraft Carrier glide straight passed our room and head out to sea. Was pretty awesome.

We had one day to share in San Diego before Fiona’s conference started, and seeing as she had been there before I had my own tour guide. We decided to spend the day in Balboa Park, which is obviously named after Rocky when he beat both Hulk Hogan and Mr. T in Rocky III. The park is situated on a series of hills which was allocated to be a giant park very early on in the planning of the City. The Park is home to a number of museums which are housed in beautiful old style Spanish buildings which gives the place a lot of character. More importantly for us, the park is also home to the famous San Diego zoo. The zoo was a great option for us as it is free for Military personnel and there spouses and we were amazed at how much like Toronga zoo it was - we think they must have been modeled on one another. It was very interesting visiting a zoo over here as there were a lot of South American and Central Asian animals which we had never seen before in any of the zoos back home. The highlight of the trip was watching the Pandas feed and the Polar bear enclosure which was a sunken design so you could watch them swim underwater! It was amazing to see such huge animals playing with balls and wrestling one another, Fi and I sat there for ages just watching them play.

Once we’d finished with the zoo we head over to the Museum of natural history as it had a touring exhibition off the Dead Sea Scrolls. Even though it was a Monday the place was absolutely packed. We did the tour and were amazed at how small the scrolls were - with the exception of one engraved on a copper plate they were tiny little scrolls covered in small beautifully articulated hand writing. Probably the most impressive was the one that contained the oldest known writings of the ten commandments, which not surprisingly were different to those in our current bible…….We then head into town to see the historic ‘Gaslamp District’ which is approximately 10 blocks defined by some old style gaslamps along the street. Although unremarkable, it was a nice strip of restaurants and pubs.

The next day saw Fiona and her boss stuck in the Logistics conference from 7:30 - 5:30 leaving me to explore the city by myself. While Fi was bombarded with lectures (and the questions that the end of her brief bought up....was a slide of all of the places that we've visited so far), I visited the nearest surf shop and rented myself a board. I then hit the coast in the car and scoped out most of San Diego’s beautiful beaches. Pretty relaxing couple of days actually. Surfing is huge in southern California and the beaches were pretty packed everywhere I went, regardless of the time of day. To top things off, the water currents in California shoot down the coast from Alaska and the water is only about 13 - 15 degrees Celsius. Unfortunately for me I was a bit off my game and was sucking severely while the surf was good, but then next day when I sorted myself out the surf sucked, so it was a fairly uneventful surfing trip for me.

Our three days in San Diego flew by with Fiona stuck in the conference and me freezing my bits off and sucking in the surf, and soon it was time for us to head up to Los Angeles. By this time it was now Thursday, which unbeknownst to us is one of the worst days to drive between San Diego and LA. My love of traffic continued to grow as we struggled our way through the heaviest traffic I have ever seen. At one stage the freeway had eleven lanes each way, and all we could see from the small hill we were on was the continual row of red lights as people stepped on their brakes in front of us, and a sea of white light as the traffic crawled towards San Diego on the other side of the freeway. We had to eat sometime so we decided that if we had a meal the traffic might be lighter when we returned to the freeway, so I started across eleven lanes of traffic to get to the right to make an exit. I think half my hair felt out and the rest went grey as I finally made it across and snuck into the exit - apparently indicators are optional, and when they are used they don’t mean anything. Luckily we stumbled upon a great Thai restaurant which had won best in San Diego the year before and had a great meal. When we got back to the Freeway most of the traffic subsided and we cruised our way to LA. We were staying in the centre of Hollywood, and more by chance than choice the hotel we selected was a short drive off the freeway making it easy to find.

We rose early next morning (the time difference between the east and west coast was a great help) and booked ourselves onto a City Tour. While the City Tours are relatively expensive and you don’t always get as much time as you would like in each destination, they are a great way to see a city if you have only limited time. We had only two days in LA which is a huge city, so it was the best option. Our Tour guide Tim was a local and provided a really good tour as we saw all the sights of the city. First on the list was the downtown area which is pretty much a business district and quite unremarkable. The only real point of interest is that many films and TV shows use downtown LA as sets regardless of where the film/show is set. For example, CSI Miami and CSI New York are all filmed in LA and they just change the number plates on the cars. Speaking of cars, California is going to a lot of effort to promote the use of Hybrid and electric cars. The downtown areas have electric car recharge points throughout the city, and if you are driving a Hybrid or electric car you don’t have to pay for parking!!

Next stop was the Hollywood Bowl which is a famous outdoor concert venue which has featured in movies such as ‘Beaches’ . Nestled amongst the Hollywood Hills, the seating up the back had a great view of the Auditorium across to the world famous ‘Hollywood’ sign. Check the photo’s we have posted and you’ll be able to make it out in the background. The Hollywood sign was originally built by a real estate investor who was selling land in an estate called ‘Hollywoodland’ which was reflected in the original sign. The ‘Land’ part was later removed leaving the now World Famous icon up on the hill. Unfortunately since 9/11 security has increased so you can no longer get up to sign and see it up close.

After the Hollywood Bowl we hit the famous Hollywood Walk of Fame and Kodak Theatre where the Oscars are held. I’ve never watched them before, so I didn’t even know what the Kodak Theatre was, and I extremely underwhelmed by it all. Fi thought it was pretty cool, but everything was much smaller than it looked on TV. We walked along the Walk of Fame checking out all the stars on the footpath and ended up the Sid’s Chinese theatre, where a small number of celebs have been invited to leave their hand and footprints in the cement. Some of the more interesting ones were Mel Gibson (Go Aussie!!), Marilyn Munroe and Shirley Temple. We had an hour wandering around here before we jumped back on the bus and headed out to Beverly Hills for a tour of the Stars’ homes.

Beverly Hills is pretty much everything you expect it to be. The tall skinny palms line the streets which are home to mansion after mansion. The homes weren’t quite as opulent as I expected, but seeing as the suburb was developed in the 1950’s the homes aren’t as big as they would be now-a-days. Fi was excited to see the homes of Cameron Diaz, Marilyn Munroe, Clark Gable (which was a mini Tara) and Jennifer Lopez. The most ridiculous one we saw was Janet Jackson who likes Ferrari’s so much she had eight of them in her drive way; 4 red and 4 yellow, all the same model…..absolutely ridiculous. That is a person who has so much money she doesn’t know what to do with it. What makes this even more absurd is that in amongst all this wealth is the largest number of homeless people we have ever seen. Everywhere we went, including Beverly Hills there were people sleeping on the street - it was quite sad really. While Janet is driving around in her choice of eight Ferrari’s, there are homeless people everywhere you look. A very interesting contrast that is capitalism out of control. Speaking of which, our next stop on the tour was Rodeo Drive - Beverly Hills’ famous shopping strip for the rich and famous. Once again we were quite underwhelmed by this place - it is a very short strip of shops, about 3 blocks, and the shops are not unlike those you would find in the posher areas of Sydney. The one exception to the rule was ‘Dijon’s’ which is an invitation only shop - I could just imagine all the Beverly Hills toffees falling over themselves to get invited to shop there - sounds like a real wankfest to me to be honest. Fi and I went for a wander through some of the shops and nothing has a price on it - apparently if you are shopping here you aren’t worried about the price! Rodeo drive was the last major stop on our trip, but the tour was certainly worth while. If we’d done it by ourselves we would have been fighting traffic, paying $20 to park for one hour and then not really known what we were looking at. The whole way around the trip the guide was pointing out interesting buildings like the Beverly Hills Police HQ that was used in Beverly Hills Cop, and the Viper Club owned by Johnny Depp where River Pheonix died. Well worth the money.

Unfortunately for us, none of the studios ran their tours on the weekend so we weren’t able have a look at any of the studios. I don’t think they would have been much chop during the week anyway as the strike by the Writers Guild has pretty much ground the filming industry to a halt. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise as we decided to head out to Santa Monica and Venice Beach for the day. We took the bus to avoid the stress of driving in the traffic which turned out to be a great move. Not only is it only $1.25 to go anywhere, the drivers for the rapid buses have device which controls the traffic lights, so as they approach they can change the lights which lets the bus cruise on through - it was awesome!

Santa Monica was absolutely beautiful - it is the first place we have really visited where the natural beauty of the place has been enhanced when developing the area (Fi didn't think so though....spoilt by the Aussie beaches - had nothing on Jervis Bay). The beach is amazingly wide (probably almost 1000m at some points) and sits below a steep cliff that is lined with Palm Trees and a continual park which follows the cliff top. The Santa Monica pier is home to a theme park out over the water complete with Ferris Wheel and Roller Coaster. A wide bicycle path runs along the length of the whole beach and is absolutely covered with cyclists, joggers, skateboarders and roller bladders. Muscle Beach is home to a whole series of fitness equipment right on the beach and has been in heaps of movies, it was pretty strange to be there. Fi and I had lucked in with a beautiful day and we wandered the park and beach before stumbling on a bike rental store. We hired two beach cruiser bikes and explored the rest of the beach on two wheels. We rode down to Venice Beach which is home to an anything goes market, skateboard parks, handball and basketball courts and roller hockey areas. The whole beachfront has been developed for any imagineable activity to encourage people to use the facilities - it was fantastic. Amusingly it attracts pretty much every weirdo under the sun, so Fi had a great time just people watching as we cruised along on our bikes. The signature tall palms runs the length of the shoreline and give the place a very relaxed feel. Some amazing places run along the board walk and must’ve been worth a bucketload of money. We had a great day soaking up the sun and atmosphere and really enjoyed our time in Santa Monica - I’d hate to see it during summer though, it’d be packed! We jumped on the bus back home and enjoyed sitting amongst the locals and seeing the parts of the city which you don’t see on the tour.

The pretty much ended our time in LA. There were a few things that we missed because we ran out of time like a Studio Tour and visiting the old 1920’s passenger ship the Queen Mary which is docked at LA. Although some elements of the city were rather underwhelming or seemed a lot smaller to see in real live rather than TV, LA offers visitors are great opportunity to see the diversity of America. The area our hotel was in was predominantly Hispanic, and several different languages were being spoken on the buses and trains that we traveled on. As you travel around you see people driving cars worth hundreds of thousands on dollars past people sleeping on the sidewalk (footpath to most normal people). The glitz and glam of the city has a sleazy underbelly that is evident in the number of ‘Thai Massage Parlours’ and ‘Stripper Supply Stores’ that line the streets just outside the famous suburbs of Beverly Hills and the Sunset Strip. It is a very unique place to visit and well worth the trip for those who make it over here to visit us.

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Photos

Hollywood Baby
The famous 'Hollywood' sign in the Hollywood hills. It originally read 'Hollywoodland' and was a gimic used to sell land in an estate called Hollywood Land

San Diego Zoo
Here's a photo of a Polar bear playing with a ball. The sunken observation deck let you see them above and below water.

Balboa Park
The museums that make up Balboa Park are all designed to look like old Spanish Missions. They really add character to the place.

The back Balcony
From our Balcony we could watch all the naval vessels come and go with a view over San Diego city in the background.

Hollywood Bowl
If you look up the back right corner you can just make out the Hollywood sign.....

The Walk of Fame
Thousands of these stars line the footpath around the Kodak Theatre. Couldn't find mine, but I'm sure it's there somewhere.....

Thankyou very much.....
This bloke was showing a lot of guts being out there.....

Chinese Theatre
The Chinese Theatre next to the Kodak Theatre is somewhat more selective about who can leave hand-prints, there's only a few hundred as opposed to the thousands of stars.

Hollywood Steel
Couldn't resist......

Beverly Hills
These signs aren't as common as what we thought, there are only four of them so we had to do some illegal driving to get a photo, so the shot is a little blurry sorry.

Marilyn Munroe's House
This was Fi's favorite, although one of the less extravagant houses in Beverly Hills.

Santa Monica
This is taken on the cliff top that overlooks the beach. These iconic tall palms are everywhere in LA and they look awesome.

Santa Monica Pier
This place has a real festive atmosphere, but I think it'd be nightmare come summer time.

Beach Cruisin'
Here's Fi cruising along the bike path on here beautiful purple rented bike....

Surely I'm not that bad......
Had to ambush her to get this kiss. I'm hoping its the beard that she's screaming about.....

Muscle Beach
Apparently this is where Arnie was discovered......maybe I can be the next Governor of California??

Armed Services Memorial
This is just a photo I took of a memorial to the armed services on the Santa Monica Boulevard. It commemorates the Army, Navy, Airforce, Marines and Coast Guard.