Blog written by Sarah and Alan's comments are in pansy pink
Sorry guys, back to my boring blogging. Alan threatened that if I didn't write today's blog, he would make me eat three meals tomorrow at Denny's. I have to say though, breakfast at Denny's has to beat the crap out of the sad continental breakfasts we've been having.
So we started this morning as usual at the bad breakfast next door of course. The weather was positively cool compared to yesterday's 40 degrees and we only reached 34 today.
We got back into the car and headed north again. We had heard that there were Australian stars in town and we wanted to see them. We booked a tour of Warner Bros Studio for midday and left at 10am to meet their suggested arrival time of an hour before the tour. We stupidly remarked how good the trip was only to discover right around the corner, a large traffic jam. It is very scary with a traffic jam going at about 80kms an hour with trucks merging in on you on the right, all the time Alan swerving around because he's trying to play the licence plate game. You know what I mean ... when you try and see a licence plate from each state. At least I don't keep pointing out California plates every 5 minutes or so!
So we arrive at Warner Bros only 15 minutes late of the suggested arrival time and instead of being concerned about being late, they were able to put us on the tour leaving 20 minutes earlier than our scheduled midday one. Even though Alan had researched and written down instructions of exactly how to find Warner Bros, he somehow managed to write down a right instead of a left turn. And he says I have directional problems. I realised the mistake early enough and cut across 3 lanes to make the turn without even a hint of danger.
We were hopeful of seeing Anthony LaPaglia so Alan could ask him why Sydney FC suck so badly (he is part owner), but it would appear that he was too busy filming to come out and talk to us. Pretty rude really.
The only "star" we saw was Hugo Weaving as you can see from our photos. We kept asking him nicely to step out of the photo of Alan with Scooby but he refused to. He seems to think he's a bigger star than Scooby Doo. As if!!! I think he was quite offended when we didn't ask for his autograph. You probably can't tell from our photos, but Alan wore his Daffy Duck shirt today. How sad is he. It was purely coincidence as it was the first shirt I pulled out of the suitcase this morning.
After the tour we headed down to Long Beach to see the Queen Mary. We made a concerted effort to hold our breath while we drove close to San Pedro, reputedly the most polluted city on the planet. It's basically a series of massive oil refineries with bulk carrier ships and tanker trucks coming and going 24 hours a day. I feel sorry for the people who live there. Alan did his trick of parking as far away as he can so we have to walk in the hot sun. He didn't mention it in yesterday's blog but he did that at Angel Stadium. Sarah has the map, I just go where she tells me. One quick photo and we were off to the other side of Long Beach for lunch. I thought, as we were going over the bridge, I'd get a great photo of the ship but in fact, all I managed to get a photo of was the walkway railing and a blurry palm tree, but really, it was a pretty impressive photo of the railing.
I think Long Beach has to be the quietest place in California. It's very similar to Surfer's Paradise but without all the crowds and cheap t-shirt shops. It's really very nice there. Walking along the marina there was barely a sole to be seen. One odd thing we saw there was a skyscraper being renovated and it was completely covered in black plastic to hide the scaffolding.
Lunch was a delicious steak at Chilli's. Although Chilli's is a burger joint, we again avoided the burgers. I think that's a new world record, the number of meals we've had in America not involving burgers. This is only surpassed by the number of meals had at Denny's. Yes, that's right, we were back at Denny's tonight. It was a shared meal at 9pm after our large late lunch.
Well that's it for me for tonight. Looking forward to the cooler (30 degree) day tomorrow.
Oh, but before I sign off, a bit of trivia. Our car is a magic car. The radio LCD display knows the name of the song and the artists on the radio.
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