HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — After the car and hotel problems John already mentioned, we headed to the El Pollo Loco for a lovely KFC-meets-Taco-Bell type lunch. Delicious, really. I can see heading back there, but John wasn’t so sure. We both did get to enjoy our first-ever churros though.

After lazing around our not-so-Quality Inn hotel room (with no elevator, thank you very much John), we finally got over the jet-lag and headed to Tinsel Town. Not gonna lie, it wasn’t exactly what I expected, but that’s mostly because we started off in the slums and then managed to continue far enough down Hollywood Boulevard to reach Touristwood, the Hollywood everyone wants us to see.

I was pretty excited. We had finally reached the people that we recognized of the Hollywood stars on the sidewalk (other than Lassie and the Rugrats, who we had seen earlier), and there we were, right at the heart of downtown Hollywood. We passed the Egyptian Theater, and made it to the Guinness World Records and Hollywood Wax Museum buildings, which were awesome. It was my first time in a wax museum, so I was pretty impressed. The best wax figure was, obviously, Sammy J. Did you really question that? He had the shades and everything.

Also, apparently there is a world record for how many cigars you can smoke at once. It was fourteen, and the man could sing and whistle at the same time. Get on that, people.

Graumann’s Chinese Theater was probably my favorite though. There were all these people dressed up in character, like Superman and Jimmy Neutron and even Optimus Prime, that people were taking pictures with. Walking around and looking at all the hand prints that celebs from Will Smith to the Marx Brothers had made felt like being around royalty. It was a surreal experience (we still have 11 more days to meet an actual celebrity; the search continues!).

We had dinner at Mel’s Diner, which was the closest thing we could find to my requested Jack Rabbit Slim’s experience (I don’t care if it’s fictional or not!) and headed back to our car when, WHAM BAM ALAKAZAM!, turns out come cops were pursuing… someone, and hit and killed two pedestrians along the way. About two blocks of Hollywood Boulevard were closed off, so we had to walk through some pretty slummy areas in order to get back on track somewhere around the Geisha House. You’re lucky, your dearly devoted reporters almost didn’t even make it to E3!

By the way, wasn’t kidding about the hotel room. After not even spending 24 hours here, I woke up this morning to find the toilet’s broken. It’s going to be awesome.

About The Author

Terri Schwartz was a Blast Contributing Editor from 2008-2009.

One Response

  1. John Guilfoil

    Okay, so it wasn’t Hotels.com’s best performance on this trip, but it’s cheap.

    And — very surprised that Hollywood and Vine wasn’t at all what I expected.

    Reply

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