Blog written by Alan with special commentary by Sarah in red.
We were up bright and early this morning ready to take our place in the Anaheim half marathon but when we saw the temperature was already in the mid 30s shortly after sunrise, we decided to give it a miss this time around and instead went next door for our continental breakfast.
Due to the extreme heat, we decided to give the theme parks a miss today and pick up our hire car a day early so we could at least go for a drive and enjoy the air conditioning. We picked up our silver Saturn and drove to Angel Stadium to buy tickets for Thursday's game. We found the carpark in a roundabout sort of way but made the mistake of parking about 36 miles from the only ticket window which was open and we almost fried from the heat coming off the concrete during the walk. After that we headed north toward Los Angeles, or wherever we might find ourselves.
The intention was to end up somewhere around Hollywood Boulevarde, but I don't think Sarah's too good with a map and we must surely have been half way to Sacramento before we finally got off the freeway and turned around. If Alan would turn when he's told to, we wouldn't have done an extra 40 miles today. So we proceded to take a nice drive through the Valley until finally we came across a street we vaguely recognised. After a bit of a drive we saw a sign saying "Lookout Mountain" so we thought that might be nice. Wrong! There was no lookout to be found and instead only very narrow winding roads up and down the mountain, during which Sarah was hanging on for dear life. I could have put my arm out the window and scraped my hand on the wall, he was so close.
After more aimless driving we stumbled across Mulholland Drive, which we knew had some great views so we went up there and took some photos looking out over a relatively un-smoggy Los Angeles. We were dying of thirst by this point so we miraculously found our way to Hollywood Boulevarde and parked just across from the Kodak Theatre. First stop was the Disney Soda Fountain where we had a BLT and 2 of the world's biggest chocolate thickshakes.
Next up we wandered out into the heat and took photos of the Kodak Theatre and Grauman's Chinese Theatre, all the while being acosted by shady looking characters trying to sell us maps to the Stars homes. On the next block was Ripley's Believe It Or Not Musem, so we took a stroll through there - the third one we've been to.
Back into the car and we were now attempting to find our friend Ray's place, at North Hollywood. Inexplicably, we seemed to keep ending up heading north again on some freeway or another and on the wrong side of the road at one point when we only needed to head a few blocks to the south east. We seem to have a real problem there. It must be the car. At one point we even ended up in Germany! Just kidding, there's a genuine piece of the Berlin Wall in Ripley's. Unfortunately Ray was either not home, asleep, or just plain avoiding us, but it's from outside his apartment block that we took the photos of us in front of the Hollywood sign.
After a couple more wrong turns (yes we almost ended up going north on a freeway again), we found our way back to the I-5 South.
Having a car meant we could actually drive somewhere for dinner so we chose Acapulco mexican restaurant; not the one we'd been to 8 years ago because it's no longer there, but another one just a few miles east of our hotel. We were given two of the most gigantic dinner plates ever seen, piled up with tacos, enchiladas, chili, rentello, beans, rice, taquitos and steamed vegies. My chili actually contained a giant whole green chili which I wasn't game to bite into. Even after all that we still had room for a chocolate cake and ice cream.
So a day without eating at Denny's. They'll probably go out of business, although there's still time for a pre-midnight snack.
Who can guess what tomorrow may bring.
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