LA trip

surprisingly, we had a really great time in LA. the plane ride wasn't as bad as it has been (i think b/c i read that "fear of flying" website), the drive from vegas wasn't bad, and our hotel was a cool art deco place right behind the hollywood/highland mall next to grauman's chinese theatre. http://www.hotelcelebrity.com here's a rundown of the vacation:

saturday - arrived in vegas & drove to LA. unfortunately, the mapquest directions sucked and we were kinda lost in heavy hollywood bowl traffic. gary's new slogan for mapquest: "we get you kinda near where you want to go." we were supposed to meet up with some dance friends for drinks, but we arrived later than planned. so we ended up eating a late dinner at mel's dinner.

sunday - we walked around hollywood blvd. funny story - we got on the elevator to view the hollywood sign. at one stop, the doors opened and spiderman got on board! definitely a surreal and welcoming experience to LA. :) i got my photo taken with a really bad chewbacca (really bad mask!), but it was funny with us both waving at the camera. let me just say - that whole street is pretty sad. other than the tourist area (that's basically 3 blocks) the rest of the bldv is filled w/trashy stores (cheap cheap items), sex shops, and pimp stores. if you stand back & look at the buildings you can see how beautiful the area prolly was 60 years ago. in the afternoon, and old friend of mine, christopher (whom i haven't seen in prolly 10 years), and his wife, picked us up and drove us around the city. LA is certainly as big as everyone says it is!

monday - we went to the erotic museum on (of course) hollywood blvd. it's was pretty interesting - especially the arts & crafts section. we drove into the canyons to see a friend of ours, lila. her husband was a balboa legend and recently passed away. i was glad to have the chance to see lila while we were in town to give her a little support. unfortunately, we couldn't stay long b/c we had tickets to "the tonight show". it was a pretty fun experience! but if you go, make sure you get in line early b/c we almost didn't make the cut! guests were kiera knightly, jim norton, & the killers. later we had a nice fancy dinner in the mall near our hotel.

tuesday - we went on the WB tour which was a lot of fun! some highlights: we saw matt leblanc getting into a golf cart as we drove by, we saw the little girl from one of the new shows (something that's on after "lost"), went onto the set of the parents' mansion from "gilmore girls", and took photos on the original "central perk" set (the stuff is original, not the location of the set). after the tour, we went to meet the bus that took us to the CBS studios to be in the audience of "4 kings" - a new show on NBC with seth green. they showed us the pilot and then we sat thru the taping of a new show. it was pretty funny - made us laugh hard at a few jokes. we were on the front row & the warm up comedian kept handing us his watch whenever he wanted to do different stunts. pretty fun experience! afterwards, we met up with matt & rebecca. matt used to be in a band with gary in tennesee. side note: matt has been on several tours with beck, and sang the "expedia dot com" and "jumbone" jingles. we went to dinner at a french restaurant, then hung out with them at their lovely house.

wednesday - we went to santa monica and spent the day walking along the shopping district, the pier, and the beach. oh, we also played putt putt which gave gary some interesting ideas for the course he's building in our back yard. for dinner we met up with the dance friends we were supposed to meet on saturday. i'd actually never met them before, but gary hung out with brian at several dance events in the past. they were both very nice & i enjoyed our dinner a lot!

thursday - we got up early to dive back to vegas. we gave ourselves an extra 2 hours to get thru LA traffic, but we didn't even get stuck except for 1 time! the flight back wasn't as bad as usually b/c gary let me play spider solitaire on his laptop. :)

so - a great anniversary trip, for sure!