Day 23: Hollywood.
Today we did the last of our driving on this holiday. We left Santa Barbara and headed to our final mainland stop of Hollywood, LA.
To be honest, I was a tad more anxious during the 6-lane portions of Highway 101 today heading into LA than I was winding around the Big Sur, but we made good time, only taking about an hour and a half to reach our final destination.
After we checked into our Hollywood hotel and said goodbye to the family truckster, we walked around the corner to the nearby Grauman's Chinese Theatre. With really only the one afternoon to check out the lifestyles of the rich and famous we took the tourist option - we jumped on a Starlines open bus to do a 'homes of the stars' tour.
This tour should really be renamed 'front gates of the rich and famous' because that's all you get to see for the most part of that portion of the trip. (Before you take a look at the photos, consider yourself warned!)
Still, for the time we had, it was a good way to take an easy ride to see some notable sights along the famous Sunset Strip and Beverly Hills - and yes, that did include Rodeo Dve, but fortunately for the credit card, this was not a hop on / hop off kind of tour!
The climax of our two hour field trip was a journey way up into the hills to get a good view of the famous Hollywood sign. Unfortunately, the iPhone was worn out from its busy day and would you believe ran out of power just as we reached the summit, so I don't have any photos I can upload here. Luckily we did have the other camera on hand as a backup.
Once we got back from the tour we revisited the theatre's famous forecourt and checked out the hand and footprints left by movie stars past and present.
We grabbed a feed from one of the restaurants in the nearby precinct before returning to our hotel for an early night. Our ride picks us up at 9.30am tomorrow to take us to LAX, where we'll jump on a plane for Hawaii - the last leg of this adventure!