Byer Family: Los Angeles (Sunday)

On Sunday we took a hop on - hop off bus tour of Los Angeles. It was interesting to see the different parts of LA, Hollywood, and Santa Monica. We started out in Los Angeles. We took the bus all the way to Santa Monica, where we got off near the pier, but first we drove through Beverly Hills and down Rodeo Drive, among other things. As I am sure you know, there are the most expensive stores in the world on Rodeo Drive… why would anyone spend over $15,000 on one suit?! (And that was not the most expensive store!) But, it was still fun to see from a open-top tour bus. We got off the bus at the Santa Monica Pier. We walked the boardwalk down to Venice Beach. That is where we had lunch at an outdoor restaurant/bar. Venice Beach was interesting, to say the least. It's definitely not our fairly-conservative Midwest style. As you can see in one of the pictures, there was a place along the beach to get prescriptions for marijuana…. the sign made it seem pretty easy to get a prescription. There were a lot of street vendors and music players as well. After checking out some of the boardwalk, we headed back toward Santa Monica Pier (more touristy and family-oriented… more enjoyable for us). Along the way there was an area with rings and slack ropes where a lot of people were doing "tricks." There's a picture of it, but it's hard to explain. We've never seen anything like it out in the public, but there were quite a few strong people practicing on the equipment.

Santa Monica Pier was very cool! There were quite a few rides out on the Pier. There was even a roller coaster. We had some ice cream (of course) before walking back to meet our bus. The bus took us back through Beverly Hills and Hollywood to Los Angeles.

We got off at the famous Farmers Market in LA. We just walked around and took in all the different food and stands. There is also a large shopping area that we walked through. We got a couple of donuts that we saved for later.

Finally, we got back on the bus that took us to the Chinese Theatre, where the hand and footprints of the stars are (and where we started). We took a couple of pictures of some of the prints (Patrick wouldn't let me put up a picture of the Twilight cast… he said we already took a picture in Forks and that would just be too much. Haha!). Mom, notice we took one of the Michael Jackson square, but it's not his print because it was added after he died. We also took some pictures of some of the stars on the Walk of Fame. There are so many stars! This was an extremely busy area, and there were people dressed up like movie stars and characters standing around for pictures (but they wanted you to pay them to take a picture with them). Because it was so busy, we decided to head back to our camper for dinner! As an added bonus, we could see the Disneyland fireworks from our camper!