Our weekend in LA
We set off at 7.30am Saturday and drove along Interstate 5 to LA! The drive was horrendous, I never normally feel car sick at all, but this journey was awful! We managed to find some amusing radio stations, a bit of country, some hard core rock and a surprising amount of Christian Rock stations, which were frankly quite disturbing! We also passed the time by counting the huge lorry loads of tomatoes passing us on the other side of the freeway, I think we got to a total of about 30, it was insane, I have no idea how they managed to grow that many tomatoes and harvest them all in one go!
The reason the journey was so pants was because of the state of the road, it consisted mainly of 10ft long concrete slabs, very badly joined together, so every turn of the wheels brought a new bump, it was like pogoing all the way from Santa Clara to LA.
Another exciting part of our journey was a forest fire, which caused a relatively long tailback and was certainly a sight to see. We couldn’t believe how close the road it was, we were basically driving through the middle of two peaks in the desert hills, and the whole side of one hill was ablaze, there were 20 or so firefighters climbing up the hill digging a trench at the edge of the fire to stop it spreading and a helicopter periodically flew over and dropped water on the flames. Certainly not a job I would want to do, it didn’t seem to be having much effect and quite frankly the guys hiking up the hill digging a trench didn’t look hugely safe! Added some interest to our otherwise boring freeway drive though.
It only took us about 6 hours to get to our hotel, with a slight detour past the Getty Museum and a drive through Beverly Hills, which was pretty good going.
The hotel was amazing! We parked our car in the multi-storey over the road in the Hollywood and Highland Center and walked over to the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. It is right in the centre of Hollywood Boulevard and opposite the famous Chinese Theatre where all of the celeb signatures and hand prints lay in the concrete paving slabs outside. As well of course as the whole length of the streets pavements topped with stars in honour of famous actors, musician, directors and frankly a lot of no bodies, or at least people we had never heard of! In fact there was a star for the guy who present American Idol, that is insane!
Anyway, the hotel lobby was incredibly dark, just lit by a few dimmed bulbs and full of huge comfortable leather sofas and wingback chairs, we realised we had actually entered the hotel from the back door and had to go down a level to the check in desk. It felt quite exclusive, but also quite relaxed, we checked in and headed up to the room, we were on the 8th floor and went up in the lift and in to our room. It was pretty small for an American hotel room, but it was very stylish and well designed. Our room was at the back of the hotel so only a view of the valet car park and back across LA, no view of the Hollywood Hills, but then we weren’t planning on spending a lot of time in the room so it didn’t matter. We put down our things and laid down on the bed for half an hour and recovered a bit from our journey, then wandered over the road to the Hollywood and Highland center, it is a very odd place, it is another typical American, trying to look old but failing miserably, building. Although the Starbucks was just what we needed, so we sat down there and relaxed with a coffee looking out at the Hollywood sign, very nice!
That afternoon we just spent time in the local area. For dinner that evening we went to 25 Degrees which is one of the bars at the hotel it serves the best burgers ever (not as good as Jasper’s infamous ones, but pretty bloody good none the less). We asked for a table and waited in the lobby of the hotel, I had a G&T and eventually we got seats at the bar to eat at. We ordered our food and I got another G&T, in fact I had 3 or 4 before we went back up to our room at 11.30pm ish.
Sunday we got up about 10am and collected our car from the valet guys, and set off to find the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown LA. We eventually found it after driving around for a bit to check out the area and parked our car in a multi-storey car park, it wasn’t until we had gone in to the space we realised the ticket said event parking! We have no idea what the event was, but we certainly weren’t attending. Anyway, we thought nothing more of it and walked over the road, in the sweltering heat to the concert hall to take some pictures, it’s a very bizarre building designed by Frank Ghery. We saw a sign for a Starbucks leading in to the gardens of the civic center, but we walked down and it was closed, in fact everything was closed, nothing in the area was open, so we headed back to the car. As we got back in to the multi-storey we noticed they had put a barrier up at the end of our row, presumably for the event parking. So we drove down a level and there was another barrier, although smaller, we just managed to squeeze our car between the barrier and the 2 concrete pillars to get out! Nightmare!
By this time we were starving so we looked on the map to see where we could go to get some food. We decided to drive over to Beverley Hills and see Rodeo Drive. As we were driving out of downtown LA, we went past a film crew, a couple of roads were shut off and there was a sign which said ‘gunfire and explosions, filming in progress’. We drove off to Beverley Hills and went to a mall to grab some food and drink, as it was about 4pm and we hadn’t had anything all day. We then drove around Rodeo Drive and that kind of area, amongst all the Bentleys and Mercs.
We then drove back to the hotel for an hour or so and grabbed a Starbucks and cooled down in our room, then we went off to Griffin Park to see Snow Patrol. They were absolutely amazing, and it was a great location in the hills surrounded by huge trees etc.
After the gig we went to the bar in our hotel again and had a burger, yummy!
Monday morning we headed off home from LA, checked out of the hotel and drove along Highway 1 towards Malibu beach, it wasn’t a hugely beautiful coastline to be honest, nowhere near as nice as Northern California. After a while we realised that it was going to take about a week to drive home on the 1, so we grabbed ourselves a Starbucks and hopped on to the 101 so we could hoof it home. We stopped at about 4pm in some weird ‘local’ town to get a subway and another Starbucks, and eventually got home at about 6.30pm.
So that was our weekend away, fab hotel, fab food, and an amazing gig!
Love ya
Fi
xxx