Vacation Day 4 - LA Tourist Supreme

Today we are slated to do some serious sight seeing, and we began by heading to a place that I have seen on TV and heard about - Randy's Donuts. This is the place with the huge donut on the roof, and it turns out that it was fairly close to our B&B. It only took us a few minutes, and there it was.

I decided to try and hold up the entire donut myself and it turned out to be easier than I thought! :P

Next we headed downtown to see the Hollywood "walk of fame" and the Chinese Theater. This was also easy to find given that Kristin had printed out all of the directions ahead of time. We parked in a very large parking garage just behind the Kodak theater (which is right next door and where the Oscars are held). We went around to the front and looked at all of the stars foot prints. I put my hands in Tom Hanks hand prints, as they were the same size. There are quite a few people who have had this honor, even R2D2, C3PO and Darth Vader have been immortalized (see below).


It seems that the most recent person to have their hands/feet put in cement gets be directly in front of the theater, and then is moved to another location to make room for the next person. The next group of people to get this honor will be Brat Pitt, George Clooney, & Matt Damon - to coincide with the release of Ocean's 13.


The theater itself was gorgeous inside, and we took the tour which was a lot of fun. A person by the name of "Little Larry", who called me "Scotty the Hottie", and was the classic struggling actor turned tour guide. He gave us an individual tour around the place including the woman's bathroom (which was quite something). There is also a wax statue in the lobby that you are suppose to rub for luck when you movie opens... kind of creepy. Jimmy was pretty funny and the tour only lasted about a half hour. Unfortunately there was a movie playing at the time of our tour, so we didn't get to see the ceiling, although we could have come back for free after the show if we wanted.

Right in front of the theater and all along the street is the Hollywood "walk of fame", which has the stars of radio, tv, and movies personalities. I took a picture of Red Skelton's star as my mom has a piece of his artwork and he was one of the first people I can remember seeing on TV.


I looked for Bill Murray's or Lucy Ball's but never could find them. We walked down to the end and back up a little past the theater, but by then we were starting to get hungry so we headed to the next place - Pink's Hotdogs (see below).


This was somewhere Kristin wanted to go and I have to say the hotdogs were pretty good. We waited for about 20-30 minutes in line to get them, and they came with crazy sauces and with names of famous stars or movies. For example, I had a "lord of the rings" which had BBQ sauce and onion rings.

After lunch it was still early enough that we decided to head over to the La Brea Tar pits. We discovered that they are really asphalt pits, but as that doesn't sound as good, they went with tar pits instead. We again looked around at the exhibits of animal bones, including the mammoth below, and even saw where they are actively digging. It was amazing to see the process they use to get the bones out and how long it takes to do so. Boy did it look messy!!


Since we were so close, and had not run out of steam, we headed to Beverly Hills and Rodeo drive. We went into the hills and drove around for a bit. The hills are steeper than you think and the views were awesome. We saw some small and large houses and then headed for Rodeo drive.

Once there, we went up and down a few blocks and it looked very much like Walnut Creek or San Francisco's Union Square, only with a few more upscale shops. I decided to go into the Izod store and ended up buying a pair of shoes and a hat. I can now say, "I shopped on Rodeo drive". Kristin saw Howey Mandel heading into the Armani store, but I did not even recognize him. Aside from Howie the only other star we say was Eric Estrada getting his star on the "walk of fame".

Nice shoes eh?

By this time we are getting pretty tired and so we decided to drive along Sunset and head back to the hotel. Then we realized that there was a House of Blues there and decided to go and have a drink before heading home. It was just like the one in Las Vegas that we had seen before, and in fact Eddie Money was scheduled to have a concert that night. No we didn't stick around.


After our drinks we headed back to the hotel and realized we had done 2 days worth of stuff in one day. This was good as it turned out to be raining the next day (and you never would have guess it from the gorgeous weather we had been having). We ate dinner at the same Italian restaurant that night, as we were both too tired to think of anywhere else and the food was really very, very good.