Random day

While in the Hollywood area, we stayed in this random hotel right near Hollywood Boulevard. It was fine- but weird. The parking was under the hotel and the storage thing on top of our car didn't fit. So we had to take everything out of it and put it in our room. Not very convenient since it was the smallest hotel we had on our trip.  The garage really was not big enough to park the cars for that hotel so we we lucky to be able to fit.  But we are not hotel snobs. We are there for the fun and we have to sleep somewhere.

In planning this vacation, we knew that after two days of theme parks, we would be tired. We planned a bit more relaxing day. The kids started out by swimming in the freezing pool.

Chase basically didn't want to get cold. So he swam like this.

Last year when we went to San Francisco we got a "Go Card" and this year when researching how we could go to all those parks as cheaply as possible, we found that we could get the LA Go card. All the theme parks were on it, and then for our "rest" day we did 2 more things that were on it.

Then we asked someone where we could go to see the Hollywood sign. They gave us directions to this lookout...

Can you see the sign? It is there! I wish we had researched it a little and gotten closer. But whatever.

Then we went to La Brea Tar Pits.

For some reason I have always wanted to go here. I thought that they had found complete animals in the tar- like skin and fur and stuff. Well, I was wrong about that. But it was cool. 

In the museum they had some tar. You could pull these handles and feel how hard it would be to get out of the tar if you were stuck.

They showed some of the skeletons that they have found.

This is only some of the wolf skulls that they have found in the tar.

They had an atrium garden. Which was fine....

But I loved this fern! I want to grow this in my house.

Then we went outside and saw the pits!  This is the most famous part and they put these statues there to show what it would have been like.

Really, they are behind fences. This particular pit is one that they excavated 75 years ago or so and then left it and it filled with rain water. That is why it looks like water- it is! But you could see bubbles come up from under the water. That was gas escaping from the tar.

We walked around to other tar pits.

Here is a big one. You can see how animals could get trapped in them. You can't really tell that it is there because of all the leaves.

Here is one that was about a foot wide.

They had one under excavation and they had a place for us to look at it.

Interesting.

Then we went to Warner Brothers Studios. They make movies just like Universal- but they don't have a theme park. But they do have a Studio Tour. We didn't know about it except that it was on our Go card. It looked pretty cool. And it was! It was one of the highlights of the whole trip. 

Our kids love Animaniacs cartoon. On the cartoon, they live in this water tower. We saw it as we pulled up.

We got there early so we took a few pictures.

We had a half hour to wait. so we sat in the weird chairs.

And then they said that they have an opening in the tour right now if you want it- so we took it! Most of the tours were 14- 15 people but this one was just our family. So it was personalized to us and what we like.

First we went to the outdoor sets. Look! It is Stars Hollow! It's from Gilmore Girls. They also use this set for a lot of other tv shows and movies. As he listed the shows- it blew my mind. They used it for the Dukes of Hazzard.

Luke's Diner from Gilmore girls

There were a ton of other outdoor sets but this blog is too long already so I'll move on to other things.

 Our guide took us to a place that they have items from the movies.

There was a lot from the recent movie Batman vs Superman.

Then... upstairs- they had all the stuff from Harry Potter! (Warner Brothers actually owns the rights to Harry, but Universal has the theme park, so Universal just pays WB a small fee to have it in their park)

They had the Sorting Hat! We had one Hufflepuff, 4 Gryffindor, and 1 Slytherin in our family.

The fireplace

A broom

We stayed in this place for a long time and took a lot more pictures... but we don't want to bore you.

We drove all over the studio lot and saw lots of buildings

and we saw inside a lot of them...

We drove through a place that makes a lot of the sets and props. That was cool.

We went inside another building and saw all the Batman cars...

and turned on the Bat Signal.

Then we went to a building that they have all the stuff. Any movie, tv show or anything can come to this huge warehouse full of stuff and rent it.

We only walked through a tiny portion and it was amazing.

They had presidential stuff

and anything you could imagine.

Then we went to the Ellen show set. It was awesome. We were not allowed to take pictures inside.

We also went to the Big Band Theory set. That was fun. (no pictures were allowed either)

We saw tons of things- it was a 2 hour tour. Then he dropped us off at another place and we got to go explore lots of cool things. Here are only a few of the things.

This was a table for The Hobbit to make the hobbits look smaller then the other characters. You can see how big Tanner looks. 

They had this thing that showed how they make computer generated creatures come to life.

They also had these cool green screen things. We could act like we were in a movie and then at the end we could watch how we look in the movie. We could also pay a ton of money to buy those movies. But we didn't- so you just get these stills that I took.

It was a fun day. We really liked it.