Day 8

Alright, so I admit I slept pretty late today, we've driven like 1500 miles or so the past week, so I figured I'd give myself a day to rest a bit. Got up at around 10 (1 EST), was too late for the continental breakfast (sorry Dad :-\ ) We weren't quite sure what to do, so we kind of sat around for a bit and tried to figure something out. We called William, who had just gotten up himself, and decided to go into Hollywood. Before we left, I went down to the hotel office, and I renewed the room for the night. This place in Glendale is pretty good, there's only one bed, which is why I brought the air mattress, but it's very clean, and has a beautiful HDTV, that I estimate is probably about 42". It's an LG, and I think its maybe a year or two later model of the LG HDTV we have in our living room back home. It does get some HD channels which is nice, though I don't think it gets AMC HD, which would have been nice for Sunday night, but oh well, I'll get by.

So we drove into Burbank, again, very smooth quick ride down Rt. 134, and picked William up at his apartment. We then took the short ride into Hollywood, and parked under the Kodak Theater. I've been to Hollywood Blvd. many times now, so nothing really blew my mind when I was there, but it was nice to see some of the important sites like the Kodak Theater, Chinese Theater and El Capitan again. Of course Krysta hasn't been to LA in 7 years, so I imagine it was probably more interesting for her than it was for me. Anyway, we headed down to the Hollywood-Vineland Plaza/mall thing, and went to California Pizza Kitchen for lunch. As what often happens, William and I ordered the exact same thing, in this case it was Diet Pepsi and Four Cheese Ravioli. Our waitress was very nice and friendly, talked to her about our various situations, and learned that she's only been here since April. After our nice meal, we went back to the car, and drove a little more.

From there we went back towards Burbank, but headed up Mulholland Drive into the Hollywood Hills. We stopped an an observation deck thing along the road and took a look at the very smoggy city. There was a house right behind us, which we overheard belongs to Ron Howard. Guess Richie Cunningham's done pretty well for himself. This observation point was pretty cool, as we could see the city skyline great (aside from the smog of course) as well as the Hollywood sign up on the mountains.

From there we decided to go to the Griffith Observatory, which didn't look to far from where we were at the time. I tried to get there without help from the GPS, but alas I ended up in a neighborhood which looked like it was populated by rich celebrities who probably wouldn't welcome lost tourists driving around their street. So we plugged the observatory into the GPS and arrived a little while later. According to our AAA book, there was supposedly a parking lot at the Observatory and street parking nearby. Once we got close, there were a ton of cars parked along the road, which made me assume there probably wasn't any parking close to the building. So I parked in one of the first places I saw, which ended up being about half a mile from the Observatory. So we all walked up to the top (yes me and my broken foot included) and went in to the observatory.

The views going up to the Observatory were pretty great, though somewhat similar to the ones we say from Mulholland Dr. We reached the place, went in and bought tickets to a planetarium show called "Centered in the Universe". Oh yeah, before I go any further, I need to mention that I'm a bit of a Star Trek fan (don't call me a Trekkie or you'll regret it) and I recently watched a 2 part episode of Star Trek Voyager (which is far inferior to TNG and DS9 I might add) that largely took place at the Griffith Observatory, so that was kind of cool. We got there at about 2:15 or so, and our planetarium show was about an hour later, so we walked around the Observatory and saw a lot of cool things, and learned how much we weighed on other planets haha.

Eventually we got into the show, which was rather interesting I guess. Me and William watched quite a few episodes of "Ancient Aliens" over the summer OnDemand and on Netflix streaming, purely to laugh at how ridiculous some of the things they said were, and a lot of what they said in this show reminded me of the show, which of course led to in jokes between me and William. The show lasted for about a half hour, and then we decided to go downstairs to see another show narrated by Leonard Nimoy (as I said, I enjoy Star Trek haha). But this show was only about the Observatory itself, and the recent renovations to it, etc. so we decided against it.

From there we headed into Studio City and went to 5 PM Mass at St. Charles Borromeo. The priest seriously looked like Geraldo Rivera which made me laugh a little inside. Anyway, afterwards we dropped William off, then headed back to Glendale. I was very proud of myself in that I was able to get back to William's apartment with no GPS and little help from him, and then back to Glendale again without the GPS. After chilling in the room a little bit, Krysta and I headed over to Ralph's and got some provisions. After that we just hung out in the room a little more, watched some TV (on that beautiful LG HDTV), I wrote this blog post, then headed to bed.