Day 2 - L.A. to Morro Bay

Yesterday was mostly a driving day, but we had the best time! We left San Diego at about 7:30 and headed for L.A. In an attempt to save some money, we stopped at a Carl's Jr. It looks just like a Hardees, but with a different name. However, it doesn't serve biscuits! Who knew?! I was very disappointed, but we did find some sort of croissant thing that was pretty good. After our breakfast, we headed on to L.A. Our first stop was going to be the Hollywood sign, but it was very cloudy and hazy, so we decided to do the walk of stars on Hollywood Blvd first.

We made it to Hollywood! It wasn't near as glamorous as it looks on tv, but we did enjoy walking the stars and seeing the Kodak Theater, Chinese Theater and where Jimmy Kimmel Live is filmed. We saw a Michael Jackson look-alike walking around there too. He looked JUST like him! After walking a few blocks, we decided we'd seen enough. The area was packed (mostly with Oriental people very excited to see the Bruce Lee star, haha they were funny), sort of dirty, and it was cloudy and really cold!

After quite a bit of searching and Nuvi leading us in the wrong direction, we finally found the Hollywood sign! We found out later that you could see it from Sunset Blvd where we drove to Beverly Hills. Oh well. It was so foggy/hazy, that we almost missed it. We drove up through Griffith Park to an observatory and parked on the side of the mountain to search for the sign. We decided it wasn't worth going all the way to the observatory because we thought the visibility was too limited for us to be able to see anything. Luckily, when we turned around to walk back down to our car, I spotted it! After seeing the sign, we decided to drive through the Hollywood Hills. Before we left, I went online and found addresses that are supposedly of the stars. We plugged in an address for Brad Pitt, and we were within 2 miles from it, so we decided to just drive there! While it probably was his house, you couldn't see a thing for the massive gate around it. We really enoyed driving around though because the houses we could see, which was most of them, were absolutely huge and gorgeous!

Then, we went to Beverly Hills. We drove down all of the "famous" streets, like Sunset, Melrose, Robertson and Wilshire. Beverly Hills was much nicer and cleaner than Hollywood. We like it there much better, and when we finally hit Rodeo Drive, I was so excited! Graham probably would have been just fine to drive on through and head on up the road, but we ended up having a great time walking down Rodeo. I loooved it! We went into a few of the stores, none were anything we could afford, and just looked around. My favorite was Harry Winston! I have never seen any diamonds like what they had, and the sales people and security gaurds were so nice to us! Once we got to the end, we went into the Beverly Wilshire hotel. It looks nothing like what I thought it would based on Pretty Woman. It was beautiful, but not like in the movie. We walked it to check the score of the World Cup and to use the bathroom. Funny, but Graham loooved these bathrooms. He said he could have "set up shop" in one of the stalls. Once we finished walking through Beverly Hills, we drove through some of the neighborhoods there. I really enjoyed looking at all of the houses.



From Beverly Hills, we went through Bel Air and Brentwood to Malibu. Malibu was such a nice beach town! We enjoyed the views there from the Pacific Coast Hwy and stopped at a place called Duke's Barefoot Bar for lunch. It was right on the beach, and the food was delicious! After lunch, we drove and drove. And drove some more. We ended up staying on the main highway (mostly by accident) but it turned out to be okay, because it took forever to get to Morro Bay. We did hit Hwy 1 for a while though, and it was so pretty, but mainly mountains. We had no idea we were going to be driving through mountains, pastures, and farm land. Here we are on the top of one of the mountains that Nuvi took us up and over. (Graham has gotten very good at taking our pictures!)

We finally got to Morro Bay around 8:00 last night. Our hotel was very nice, and the room was much bigger than the one in San Diego! We were both very happy about that. We had planned to go eat a nice dinner, but we ended up going to this shack of a pizza joint around the corner from our hotel. It turned out to be sooo good, and we really enjoyed it. Morro Bay was a cute little, very laid back town. Graham really liked how relaxed it was. We drove around (the 3 blocks that were there) and looked out at the water. The main attraction in Morro Bay is Morro Rock. It is a huge, and I mean huge, rock that sits just out in the bay. We left Morro Bay this morning for Carmel. Graham did a wonderful job driving us here, and the drive was gorgeous! We are in Carmel safe and sound...more to come later!