4/28/2023
We had a busy day today. We went down to Venice and Santa Monica before heading back up to LA. We started by walking Venice Beach. It was early enough that most of the crazies weren’t out yet. Unfortunately it was pretty gloomy and cool so we didn’t go in the water. Ashley didn’t like Venice very much. She thought it was gross and scary. We walked through the farmers market before heading up to Santa Monica.
Ashley liked Santa Monica much better. Compared to Venice, it is much cleaner and there are less homeless on the beach. We walked to the pier and I finally finished my trip to the end of Route 66, click the link to see that part of the trip. We stopped at Rusty’s Surf Ranch on the pier for lunch.
After the pier we walked around downtown Santa Monica and the Third Street Prominade before heading back up to Hollywood.
Ashley wanted to see the Hollywood sign so we took a drive up to the Hollywood Hills. This is not a drive that I recommend with a large vehicle. A good chunk of it is one lane and it’s all hairpin turns. There were a few times I had to slam on my brakes because there was a car coming at me on the other side of the turn. We eventually got up to the park where there is a view of the sign. I did not know there was a dam and reservoir up there either. It is pretty up there, but I would hate to live there and have to do that drive every day.
We were going to go up to the observatory after leaving the sign since it was fairly close. We got to the Griffith Park and saw that you had to pay to park up there so we ended up skipping it. I got a hold of Kiel and he was nice enough to treat us to a Dodger game. We went back to his place to get ready. It took longer than I thought to get there and we ended up getting to the game late. There was so much traffic that we didn’t get in until the 3rd inning. Kiel got us some great tickets behind first base. We didn’t walk around the stadium much since we were late. The Dodgers won and they had fireworks after the game. Overall it was a fun experience.
