Vacation 16: Hollywood

After we dropped off our RV, and picked up the rental car for the next couple of days we drove up Sunset Boulevard through Beverly Hills, and then went to our hotel in Hollywood. It was in walking distance to the Hollywood Boulevard, with all the main attractions. I remembered it as a dump, and not much has changed.

The famous HOLLYWOOD sign

The Kodak Theatre, where the Oscars are now being held

Grauman's Chinese Theatre - the old place of the Oscars, and where there are
the famous foot and hand prints in the front.

The famous stars on Hollywood Boulevard - there are endless rows of them, many of which are dirty and in pretty dodgy parts of the street...

Jack Sparrow...

The next day we went to the Universal Studios. We went right away to the new Simpsons ride, because we knew it would be the most popular one. And we were right, we only had a short wait, while later that day there were long queues. The following photos were taken outside the ride. The ride itself was in an animated car, and hard to describe other than it was absolutely fantastic!

We then took the "train" to the real studios. It went through a number of scenes and themes from previous movies and TV shows, including some special effects.

From "The Fast and the Furious"

The "car park". The Ferrari is from "Magnum P.I."

A Mexican village.... it starts raining...

...and a flash flood is coming down the street...

...and wipes everything away.

From "Jurrasic Park" and "The Lost World"

From "JAWS"

From "King Kong" (the latest edition)

I can't remember for which film this was, but they used a real B 747 jumbo for this scene. It is the most realistic aircraft crash scene ever made...

Mr Bates from "Psycho"

From "Desperate Housewives"

Universal Village is outside the park (i.e., you don't need a ticket for it). It is an artificial street full of eateries, souvenir shops and a multi-cinema movie complex...

After we had done all rides and shows, we had to head back to LAX, where I checked in to my hotel for the night. After a short while it was time to drop Neil off at Terminal 2 for his flight back to New Zealand. We had an absolutely wonderful, elephantatsic, amazing vacation! I loved every bit of it. It was really sad to see Neil going back home, while I had another two months of travelling ahead. Next day I was to head north to Alaska!