Hollywood Sky
After all the wedding festivities, were complete Alexis and I ran away to the south and down the 1 to experience SoCal. Our first stop was Santa Monica after driving thru Malibu and seeing multiple Bentleys, a dozen Lambos, Multiple Rarri’s, and too many Porsches. In Santa Monica, we checked out the pier and the shops.
The Santa Monica was busy especially with it being a Sunday. From here we drove down Wilshire through, West Hollywood and saw some amazing bars and shops. However we couldn’t dilly day to much, so we went further to check into the Historic Hollywood Hotel. Using this as base for night, we set out to check of the Hollywood Farmers Market. The Hollywood Farmers Market is a mashing of stores selling food and goods. All of the stores seem to be built as a afterthought with them being built one on top of another, with overlapping roofs. After wandering around a bit, we ate some sushi and pastries from the local shops. Being in walking distance from the market, we headed down the street a couple of blocks to the LA Museum of Art and the La Brea tarpits. The tarpits were a pretty weird site, with bubbling pools of pitch and tar in the middle of LA. the biggest pit had several fake animals posing as if they were trapped. One of the tarpits was under excavation, and had massive site fenced off.
From here we drove down Hollywood Blvd, and saw the Hollywood Walk of Fame. With time still left at night, we pulled over found some free parking and decided to go check out the street performers and the cement handprints (my feet and hands matched Sean Connery’s). After a long day, we didn’t want to hear the street performer for too long, so we retired to the hotel.
In the morning, we drove up into the hills to look at the Griffith Observatory, which we saw from our hotel room. Driving up the hills, we missed any traffic and wound up the snakelike road to the top of the hills above Hollywood. The reason we found out that there was no traffic was because the observatory was closed on Monday. Nevertheless, we go to see the iconic structure and had some great views of the city. From there we left for the Warner Bros. Studio in Burbank. The studio tour was very cool in that it gave you a good look at the sets and structure that a lot of stuff is filmed on. We got to see the Friends set, the WB water tower where the Animaniacs lived, stairwell in Gremlins, Casablanca store front, Big Bang set, Two and Half Men set, Batman cars, Mask building, Spiderman water pipe upside-down kiss site, Harry Potter costumes & props, Chuck house, every embassy and fake White House entrance.
Then we headed back to the beach at Venice to check out the scene and what a scene it was. It was pretty much exactly how I expected it to be. It was filled with weird street performers, lots of homeless on the beach edges, a gnarly skate park and Jersey Shores type shops. Muscle Beach was lacking some muscle when we saw it. Mainly it was filled with awkward people in saggy Speedos. I got to play around on the free muscle beach pull up and rings area.
Worn out again from another long day, we got a room in the Woodland Hills. Fulfilling our craving for empanadas and In-n-Out, we laid around and froze at the hotel pool at night. In the morning, we drove up to Santa Barbara for some great fruit bowls and the pier, before trying to catch our flight. We board the plane quickly and easily, however no one else boarded after us. After about 10 mins, they asked us to get off the plane. The pilot stated that someone had run the luggage conveyor into the side of the plane. After the flight was canceled and we were put on a later flight, we uber-ed it to the beach for several hours. Lindsey met us after work and we chatted a bit. Then we uber-ed it back again to the airport in a sweet Range Rover. This time we made the flight out of Santa Barbara and eventually made it back to Charlotte at 7am the next day.
