Beverly Hills and Hollywood

After "wasting" Wednesday, we needed to cross another item off of our list.  It was off to the big city.  About and hour and 20 minutes to Beverly Hills.  First thing we saw, while we we looking for a place to park, was a Bugatti Veyron 16.4 - this is the fastest production car on the planet.  At somewhere between 1.5 and 2million, it was pretty cool that you could walk up and take your picture with it.

how often do you see a $1.5mm car on the street?  

Amy found the restaurant owned by one of the Housewives of Beverly Hills - Villa Blanca, so we had lunch there in hopes of seeing some famous people.  The two guys sitting by us told us we just missed Ken (the owner's husband), by about twenty minutes.  They also pointed out a "housewife" from the Miami show in the back corner.  Apparently these shows have a cult following - and my wife is one of them.  She was giddy we got to eat there - obviously most of this is lost on me....

 Looking for famous people at Villa Blanca

Walked around Rodeo drive - pretty neat to see.  Looked at replacing my wedding ring at Tiffany's.  Probably not going to buy the replacement mine there.  Old school houses in the area are really neat.

Off to the mayhem that is Hollywood Boulevard.  Saw the stars on the sidewalk.  Didn't realize that this would be lost on the kids because they really don't know who most of them are and can't figure out why Selena Gomez doesn't have one. 

Still can't figure out why Sophie was so excited to find Ozzy's star

(and yes, RUSH has one too)

Abby and Johnny Depp's handprints

Then saw the handprints outside of the Chinese theater.  Lots of cool ones there.  Several people dressed up as actors making money by letting people take their pictures with them.  The guys dressed up John Travolta and Samuel L Jackson from Pulp Fiction were the best.  Lots of "junk" trinket shops along this stretch and makes me wonder what else LA has to offer to the foreign tourists.  Maybe its all of the surrounding area and all of the beach towns.  If this is not the case, then NYC is a lot more entertaining to the tourist.

Remember SWATCH watches????  Apparently they still sell them - the inner 14 year old in Amy came out and she bought one.  Not sure if this will be trend in Bay Village again.

Since there wasn't much else here, I had to forgo my general nature of cheapness and let the kids go into the "Ripley's Believe it or Not" tourist trap.  Of course they love this stuff.   Among the many freaky things in there - there is video of guy from Cleveland who can pop his eyeballs out of his socket whenever he wants too.  Hopefully, I won't have to pay to go into one of these again.  On our way back to car, ran in to the street performers.

No trip to the big city would be complete without street performers.

I missed the video when they pulled Evan out of the crowd and gave him the chance to jump over three people - of course he tried it.

Sun is now getting ready to set and we haven't seen the Hollywood sign yet.  This is  one of the things Abby wanted to make sure that we did.  Using the GPS to take the "fastest route",  we end up on a one lane road that is one blind turn after another winding up the mountain.  Happily, there wasn't anyone trying to come down the same road we were going up.  No head-on collisions to report.  Amazing there are a ton of houses, some nice, some much less impressive that are basically just built into the side of the mountain on this road.  Many of them don't appear to have garages (or driveways for that matter) and their cars are just parked in front of their houses.  We all decided we wouldn't want to be the guy to drive the garbage truck up this road.

We made it just as sun was setting, so the pictures aren't that great - but we got to see it.  The regular road down is the wide enough to get the tourist busses up and took us straight to the freeway.

                                            Not a great picture, but a picture nonetheless.