Road Trip USA. We're off to Hollywood

The uber long drive to LA, through the desert, stretched before us as we listened again to the scary warnings of death by the roadside if you were reckless enough to travel unprepared for breakdowns. Cheery! We broke the journey and stayed overnight in a town called Needles that certainly fitted the saying "We're not in the middle of nowhere, but you can see it from here!" I suppose it must have been an oasis in the desert at some point, but all we could see was dusty, sweltering concrete and no fathomable reason why anyone would want to live there, let alone how they support themselves. It was boiling - 105 degrees - so we hid out in our room with the AC going and enjoyed some TV!

We had booked a hostel in Hollywood (our last Dormitory stay of the trip YEAH!) and we managed to negotiate the labyrinthine freeways leading into LA with only a few wrongs turns. Hollywood, as it turns out is not very glamorous, more seedy and fraying round the edges but the hostel was nice and very sociable. We dropped the car off at the rental agency and discovered we had done 4000 miles in 3 weeks - not bad going! We walked the hall of fame on the way back t the hostel, shouting excitedly when we saw a name we recognised. There are an awful lot of people who have a star on the sidewalk that I have never heard of!

From USA

We went on a limo tour of LA that night, although we weren't really dressed for it. Everyone else had shirts, trousers, make up etc and there was us in our combats and the same old T-shirts! It was a real party tour with free beer and champagne, and the tour guide's sole mission seemed to be to get everyone as drunk as possible. As a result we didn't get to see that much of LA, and as our main aim was not to fall over drunk, it was a little under whelming!

From USA

The following day we went on a walking tour to the Hollywood sign which was really hard work! It was worth it though, as we walked through the Hollywood Hills and saw the houses of the rich & famous (well mainly just the rich), the sports cars in the driveways and the pools out the back. We stopped at points along the way so our guide could take photos of us and the sign:

From USA

From USA

Lunch was next to the Hollywood sign itself whilst we gazed across LA to the ocean.

We spent our last day in LA, and indeed our last day in the States, at the Warner Bros. studio tour. Now this was great! We were driven around the studios in a giant golf cart and we saw, and walked on, streets built for the outdoor scenes of programs/movies, and were told how each program dresses the streets to make them look like different cities; we saw the ambulance bay from ER and the fire escape that Spiderman hangs upside down from, whilst being kissed in the rain by Kisten Dunst. We also saw a jungle/lagoon area that has been used for everything from scenes from the Vietnam war, to Japanese mountain tops, to grisly body discoveries in Cold Case.

From USA

From USA

We then got to go into one of the sound stages and saw the set of Two and a Half Men (no actors unfortunately), and a museum of cars from the movies: the batman cars, the Scooby Doo van, the flying car from Harry Potter, the Dukes 0f Hazard car and motorbikes from the Matrix. A movie buffs dream! Next up was a museum housing scripts, guns, costumes and memorabilia from movies across the ages; AND Heath Ledgers last costume worn in The Dark Knight! After this was a Harry Potter museum with the sorting hat, snitches, the marauders map etc and then the prop warehouse - a pretty unexciting collection of tables, chairs, mirrors and the like, until we saw the retired set of Central Perk, from Friends. It was great!

From USA

And then it was time to leave. We took a taxi to the airport and it was a really strange feeling to be ending that part of our trip. We'd been on the road for 4 months and yet it seemed like yesterday we waved mum off at the train station in Southend. We were ready to stop for a while though, to have a base, and a wardrobe instead of a bag felt like luxury. A bit of 'normality' was required to balance all of our adventures, but that feeling wore off very quickly!