Los Angeles Guide

In October 2011 John and I took a trip to California. We started in San Diego, mentioned in a post here. Then we drove up the coast taking Highway 1 or 101 to Los Angeles.  I HIGHLY recommend taking this route. It was so scenic and we drove next to the ocean the majority of the way.  I tried to take a picture from the car

You also get to go through some neat towns like Laguna Beach and Orange County. This a  picture John took from Laguna Beach. Its breathtaking. Now I know why people live there.

However, right outside of Orange County, traffic began. People always say LA traffic is awful and it definitely lived up to its reputation. Once we got to LA we did a quick driving tour through the downtown section. We only had one day and night in LA so every thing was really quick. The downtown seemed alright but its definitely not the place you want to be. If you are staying in LA you will want to be in Hollywood or West Hollywood. After our brief tour around downtown, we made our way through town to Hollywood. We stopped at Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles for dinner. The combination was so tasty and the meal was pretty cheap, $10ish a person. I highly recommend it.

Once we were on Hollywood Boulevard, we parked and walked around. This is where all the stars names are in the sidewalk and where all the touristy things are. 

We also saw Grauman's Chinese Theater

John got a fun picture with some Star Wars characters. For those of you who don't know John is a huge Star Wars fan. Overall, Hollywood boulevard is pretty much like Times Square in New York. After we walked around a bit more we drove through West Hollywood. This looked like a super fun neighborhood. Tons of high end stores, bars and restaurants lined the streets. I would probably stay in this neighborhood next time.

Then we drove through Beverly Hills.


The stores are all amazing but really high end and expensive so we just drove through. Also, it was so late that all the stores were closed which is good for my wallet ;).  After that we drove out to Santa Monica, which is where I booked our hotel. I was amazed at how close LA is to the ocean. Santa Monica is like a 15 minute drive. Once we reached Santa Monica, we went straight to the hotel and to bed. We stayed in nothing fancy, just a Comfort Inn. The next morning we woke up early (9 am for us) and explored Santa Monica and Venice Beach. Santa Monica is a cute shore town with a boardwalk.It has some really nice shops along the main drag and have great views. I cute definitely see spending a trip just there. However we didn't spend much time in Santa Monica, instead we went down to Venice Beach. There we rented a tandem bicycle and rode along the "boardwalk".

It was a beautiful day and the beach is so pretty. The ocean is surrounded by gorgeous views of the mountains like in the picture above.

The boardwalk is actually more like a sidewalk with lots of vendors and shops along the way. We stopped at some of the shops along the way and I got that hat in the picture above. It was a fun ride. We could have easily spent all day there, but we needed to begin our trek up the coast to San Francisco so we left shortly after 1 pm.

This was a super short trip through LA but I think we covered the main highlights. We definitely need to go back one day and spend more time on those things and see some of the stuff we missed, like the Hollywood sign.