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!

Day 8 - San Luis Obispo to Hollywood

We woke up to a very foggy morning but apparently this is the norm and it soon cleared. 

We stopped off at Shell Beach for a virtual which was an interesting spot with cool sea stacks and noticeably the nesting pelicans were uncannily quiet.

Our USB adaptor had blown a fuse after plugging in the inverter so we had to track down somewhere that sold fuses, after trying a couple of places we managed to find the right ones in Walmart.

Next stop was Solvang - Solvang was an interesting little place, it was founded in 1911 by a group of Danes who travelled west to establish a Danish colony far from the mid-western winters.  We didn't have much time there but we did buy a Christmas decoration from the Jule Hus (Christmas Store) and had a lovely chat with the lady behind the counter who told us all about the history of the place and was really interested in our travels.

Then we moved on to Santa Barbara where we did a couple of virtuals, the best one was at the court house, at first we thought it would take too long but we decided to make a start anyway and see how far we got as it had quite a few stages.  It was such an interesting building we decided to complete it.

Road to Santa Barbara

Santa Barbara Court House

View from the Court House

The Big Fig

Then it was onward to our motel in West Hollywood. 

Once we'd checked in we decided to head up to the Griffiths Observatory to watch the sunset.  When we got to within a mile of the observatory the traffic was stationary and we were puzzled as to why there were people trying to sell T-shirts to the cars in the queue, to our surprise we saw they were Adam Ant T-shirts which seemed a little bizarre and random so a quick google and we found that Adam Ant was actually having a come-back concert in the Greek Theatre in Griffith Park  - of all the days to choose. We were absolutely amazed how many people were attending this concert, I mean back in the day I was quite a big Adam & the Ants fan but not sure I'd go to a concert now.  Realising we had zero chance of getting to the observatory before sunset we did a U-turn and headed back into Hollywood and went to Mel's drive-in - a really cool diner with  juke box on every table and loads of choice on the menu.