Hollywood

Today, we tried to do the almost impossible – Hollywood and Beverly Hills on about $10. Before that though we had another challenge to overcome, the roads and traffic of Los Angeles. Roads seem so busy in LA, and every road seems to have multiple lanes, bizarre slips roads and tricky junctions. Add in the customary larger than normal potholes and an extensive array of crazy traffic fearless pedestrians and it can be somewhat stressful to take even the shorter of journeys.

We managed to navigate our way up to Beverly Hills without incident though (hootings of horns and potential near misses no longer count as ‘incidents’) and as an added bonus we sussed out some free street side parking down a pleasant looking side street. Beverly Hills seemed quite quiet and with a lot of boutique shops blatantly out of our price range, we wandered across to a road side park where we planned a spot of lunch. It was a nice day and we spent a bit of time sat in the park, which was basically a wide grass verge with some trees and a bench. A nice grass verge all the same!! Pleased with our free parking, we treated ourselves to a hot chocolate on one of the street side café’s before setting off to brave the roads up to Hollywood.

One of the first town signs we have seen without gunshot holes in it!

To be honest, we were both a little disappointed with Hollywood. Think Blackpool but maybe with more people and an even wider range of tourist shops and gimmicks. Even the stars embedded in the pavement failed to interest us a great deal, probably because we recognised only about ten of the names in the whole street. We did manage to get a snap of the Hollywood sign on the hill, so we can honestly say it is now ticked off the list and we don’t need to ever return.

The gov'nar!!


The Hollywood sign between the Paris Hilton and Kick-Ass boards

Before we headed back, we took a short drive up onto the hills and along Mulholland Drive where we were pleasantly surprised by some of the views of the city. Los Angeles looked surprisingly green from a height, but you also got to see just how big a place it is. There are buildings as far as you can see and at any one time there seems to be around four aircraft in the sky leaving or arriving at one of LA’s many airports.

We’re not blown away by LA, but maybe our jaunt to Universal Studios in the next couple of days will sweeten us up a bit!