Day 9 - Los Angeles

Up early as usual and walked down to the Ultimate Hollywood Tours office to join the tour we'd pre-booked.  While we were waiting for everyone to arrive we were shown a video and a member of staff talked us through it saying about famous people they'd seen and also told us about when Will Ferrell had come along on the tour and also when then Kardashians had come along in disguise and loads of other funny stories and anecdotes to get us warmed up for the tour 😉.  The guy was a real character and had us all laughing.

Hazy view of LA

Justin Timberlake's bins

Interestingly our guide was Turkish born, grew up in Germany and has lived in LA for 18 years and presumably spoke whichever language was required.  On this occasion it was just English.  As it was early Sunday morning there was very little traffic around so there were no hold-ups as some of the tours sometimes experience.

Michael Jackson's last residence

The gate to Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion

Puff Daddy's gate

The tour lasted about 2 hours and took us around the neighbourhoods of the rich and famous and some filming locations which were quite interesting.  Some of the celebrities were people we were familiar with and some we hadn't but on the whole it was a good way to see the area and a break from driving around and this bit would've been tricky to do by ourselves - the guide seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of how much celebrities had paid for their houses and how many bathrooms and bedrooms they had.  We got to see the homes and past homes of Donald Sutherland, Donald Trump's Hollywood home, Gwen Stefani, Justin Timberlake, Taylor Swift, guy from Sons of Anarchy, Borat and Isla Fisher, Michael Jackson, the house where Prince sadly died, Carrie Fisher, Courtney Love, Puff Daddy, Bela Lugosi, Orlando Bloom, the gates to Hugh Heffner's playboy mansion and floral tributes this is to name but a few.

We saw Katy Perry's properties and that she currently has one on the market for $9 million!!  We also saw Erick Morillo's house, the guy who wrote 'I like to move it move it' best known from the movie Madagascar.

Erick Morillo's house high up in the hills

We were keen to get as close to the Hollywood sign as we could so we'd researched this beforehand and found the best location to go to.  Which was a great idea as there was no one else there but further down the road you couldn't move for people taking photos from the roadside which was nowhere near as good a spot as we'd found *smugface*.

After this we headed to Santa Monica to go to the end of pier which also marks the end of the historic Route 66.

The heat from the sun was intense and I didn't have a hat or sun-cream and could feel that I was burning so we headed back to the cover of a coffee shop where we had coffee and ice creams.

Binocular Building

We stopped off for a quick look at the canals in 'Venice'.  It was then time to have another go at getting to the Griffiths Observatory for sunset, allowing ourselves plenty of time this time.  It was great to finally visit this iconic location after seeing it on many films over the years, most recently LALA Land.

We'd intended to get an early night as we need to be up at 2am tomorrow but it was gone 11 by the time we turned in.

Tomorrow Seattle!