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I had only 3 days in Hollywood and so had to cut my time down to doing the essentials, The Hollywood Sign, Universal Studies, The Walk of Fame, and a few museums.
I trekked up to the Hollywood sign on my first day in the blistering LA heat and got some shots of smog and little else. I did the usual Mullhulard Drive walk and got some snaps with the sign behind me and than decided to get a bit closer to the sign. Now this is no easy task in itself. The road that goes up there is long and winding with absolutely no shade. By the time I got up there I had sweated buckets only to be above the sign with only views of the tops of the letters and all the smog of the city.
But than! I happened to see a gate that was not locked, well not with a padlock anyway, that lead to a path down to the letters. I decided that it not being locked and no signs forbidding entry meant that I was more than welcome to climb down. And so I walked though the gate to no alarms and decided to climb down the hill side thanks to a rope that had been just left there! It was only when I got down to the H was there a sign with lots of legal and police type words on it. I thought I might as well get some pics now that I was there only to set off an alarm the second I walked in front of it. I snapped off some crap very close up shots and decided it was time to climb the hell out of there. Luckily nothing happened.
The rest of my day was not so eventful as I walked down the walk of fame. I don’t know what I was expecting but it is just a path with a bunch of names of people that I had never even heard of. Also the three museums that I wanted to see were all closed for refurbishments or closed altogether. After that I decided to walk back to the sweat box called my hostel. While I was there LA was experiencing a heat wave and due to the surge in power from people using their air-con units the county was having rolling black outs. So you got to sit in the dark as well as being roasting!
My next stop was Universal Studios. Due to my time restraints and ticket prices I decided to do Disney or Universal. Universal was closer, end of decision! I went with one of the guys from the hostel and we did all the “rides”. I would say that you only call a couple of them rides the rest were more what you would call experiences. The Back to the Future ride was great and my favourite. The Shrek 4-D show was a good laugh but most of the rides were relating to old filmes. The most recent ride was about “The Mummy” which came out about 5 years ago. The back lots was cool as you got to see Bates Motel, Amity island, Jaws (very tame), King Kong, and Sponge Bob! I missed the chance to get my photo taken with Beetlejuice as he was on break when I got there, bloody actors!
We basically spent the day going from one ride to the other. We got very lucky with the queues as they all have a very speedy line if you are going on your own. The trick is to go in these lines. We got to go together on everything due to the number of people queuing in the regular lines that were in 3’s. I think the most we queued for was about 15 minutes. We also got lucky as a family was leaving when we weregoing to get something to eat and they gave us there all you can eat wrist bands. Thanks to their large writs we could just slip them on without tearing them.
All in all Hollywood was fun but my hostel was hotter than Hells waiting room. From Hollywood I went to San Diego. I wanted to go there to go to Tijuana and see Venice Beach and all the tanned beauties that the movies tell you roller blade in next to nothing everyday.
My mistake was believing the movies. I cycled 44 miles of beach from Venice down to some pier 22 miles away and back and did not see one women in a thong roller-blading, in fact not one tanned beauty at all. It was just kids doing surfing school and life guard training. I did however get a nice tan and some good exercise so the day was not total waste.
Until next time, Em
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