A couple months ago I went on a road trip to LA to be the complete American tourist. Amanda, a friend I met in Italy who is also attending Naval Postgraduate School and I drove down to LA from Monterey around lunch on a Friday. The traffic actually wasn’t that bad. Staying in a hotel near Santa Monica, we decided to get ready for the evening and head into downtown.

I looked up some night clubs and we booked a reservation at Perch nightclub, which I loved! The cocktails are mixed well and the food is soo good, not to mention the fact that it is located at the top of the Pershing Square Building, with a great view of the sunset. We ordered the Ahi Tuna starter and Steak Frites, both of which were just so good. I highly recommend checking it out if you are in the area.

View of LA from Perch.

I can’t say enough how friendly and nice everyone was while we were in Los Angeles for the weekend. We made friends with all kinds of people. At Perch we met a girl from Papa New Guinea and her three friends visiting from Australia, on Sunset Boulevard we met the nicest woman at the BCBG shop and she gave us champagne while we were shopping, on Hollywood walk of fame we stopped in at a bar where the bartender was from Pittsburgh and she gave us our drinks for free.. We had lunch on sunset boulevard and the couple sitting next to us gave us all kinds of tips for things to do in LA. I couldn’t believe it. We even were able to convince a meter maid not to give us a ticket! It was like we were getting special treatment the entire weekend.

The next morning we woke up, ate breakfast at our hotel, packed our bags and headed over to the Griffith Observatory. Cobie, my friend in Monterey recommended we check it out. We should have probably gotten there a little earlier because it was packed and we did have a bit of a time finding parking, but once we did we walked up the hill and saw the city of LA from just underneath the Hollywood sign.

Hollywood baby! My first time seeing this sign in person.

View of LA from up here on the hill. If you are in the area I can also recommend checking out Griffith Observatory. They have half hour planetarium shows that play and we got tickets to the next showing and walked around the grounds for a few minutes before heading over to get in line.

Griffith Observatory, Los Angeles

Everything looks so small compared to the downtown sky scrapers.
One of my favorite pictures of the trip, just before we walked into the planetarium for the show. The show was so informative and we walked through the gift shop afterward before heading back down to the car.

Once we were down at the car we were pretty hungry so we drove over to sunset boulevard for lunch and stopped at a restaurant called Eveleigh for a late lunch, and again the food and drinks were phenomenal.

A peach cocktail for me & a Pimms and Gingerale for Amanda. It made me remember how much I loves Pimms, I need to get a bottle.
The burger and fries were dang good too. We ate and had few more drinks, then did a little shopping and stopped for coffee.

By this time it was later in the afternoon and we hit sunset boulevard to head over to the Hollywood walk of fame and the Chinese theater.

Stopping into a souvenir shop, we bought a $1 map and set off. There are over 2,000 stars so we had alot of ground to cover.

Andrea Bocelli has his own star! I didn’t know and it instantly reminded me of the Opera at Caserta Palace in Naples, Italy last year.

STAR WARS.

Amanda and I paying homage to Walt Disney.

HARRY POTTER HARRY POTTER, Snape, Snape, Severius Snape. Heeeermione. Ron, Ron, Ron Weasly. Anyway these guys there hands and feet imprinted at the Chinese theater.

Just thought I’d show some love.

Other stars at the Chinese theater.

We stopped at a bar on Hollywood Boulevard just for a few drinks and apparently it was fleet week in LA that weekend so there were sailors there in their uniforms. hehehe.

After a few drinks we dipped out and headed back towards the car, stopping at a sushi restaurant for dinner along the way. Another great choice, at this point I’m almost convinced there are no bad choices in all of Los Angeles. haha.

We drove over to Six Flags Magic Mountain and spent the night at a hotel right by there because we were headed to the park first thing in the morning.

The next morning we took the trolley over to the park and were there when the gates opened. Another grand day! Before lunch, the park was not very crowded so we were able to ride something like 11 rollercoasters without having to wait in line. My favorite one by far was the virtual reality rollercoaster where you wear the headset. It was like being inside of the video game halo. SO COOL!

Go Carting at Six Flags, I by far at the slowest one 🙁

Merry-Go-Round Cheesing

Suicide squad promo

Swings, duh. Best ride in the park.

In the late afternoon, we got into our car and over ambitiously decided to drive to San Bernadino and spend the night there so we wouldn’t have to wake up so early in the morning for our tour of Hearst Castle. The problem was, we were pretty tired from our day at the park and Amanda was driving, but it was four hours to get there. We arrived pretty late and fell right into our beds for the night.

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