The American Dream (part I)

Hello blog!!! Long time no see, I know, I know... I should have been back here telling you all about my holiday in the States but, luckily, I was welcomed back by a helluva lot of work which came in pretty handy considering I'd just spent three weeks travelling around California!!

I've decided to just run through the highlights because we wrote a travel journal on the road (handwritten, old school style, packed with stories and decorated with everything and anything, from plane tickets to fines (!) to Walmart receipts). I'm going to break the trip down into several posts because we did so many things and saw so many sights that I just cannot see how I can squeeze it all into a single post.


Let's start with LA in the movies.

We decided to hit Westwood Memorial for our first visit. I mean, where else would you have me go?! Marilyn, Truman Capote, Natalie Wood, Farrah Fawcett, Bettie Page, Frank Zappa, etc. From there we made our way towards Beverly Hills. Don't get me wrong, though, I was NOT driving around in search of Beckham's house, more like the house where Bugsy Siegel was gunned down, the witch's house, the Nightmare on Elm Street house, 10066 Cielo Drive...

 Afterwards, we drove all the way up to Mulholland (über cool) and then sat in a traffic jam on the way down to have lunch at Musso & Frank before stepping into Terminator's shoes at the Chinese Theatre. I still can't get over how tiny Rita Hayworth's feet were!! The fact that the Kodak Theatre is actually inside a shopping centre was also pretty mind blowing. Very strange!

Hollywood Forever was also on our to-do list, obviously. It's one of my favourite cemeteries ever, up there with Montparnasse. It's like a massive garden, peacocks, geese and ducks galore. Such a cool place, what with the lake, the animals and the Hollywood sign there in the distance! It's home to the likes of Johnny & Dee Dee Ramone, Don Adams, Vampira, Cecil B. DeMille, and a host of others.

Other movie and TV locations we called in at included Griffith Observatory, the American Horror Story house, the Fisher & Sons funeral home, Doc Brown's house from Back to the Future, Los Angeles river, High Voltage Tattoo, the Formosa, Six Feet Under, the tar pits in La Brea, and my all-time favourite, the Walsh house.

I could go on and on and on but it's football time. Me and my priorities!! I know!!!

To be continued...