We’ve had 4 days in L.A. now since landing back on the mainland, and it’s been pretty busy. We didn’t do much on our first day other than wake up late because we were now 3 hours ahead of Hawaiian time, pick up our rental car and then go to do a bit of shopping since the weather was pretty rubbish.

Griffith Observatory and Philippe’s

The crappy weather continued in to our second day, as it was pretty rainy and dreary but we decided to shuffle some of our plans around and take a day trip to the Griffith Observatory. This was about an hour away from where we are staying, more when the LA traffic is busy!

It was free to get in, which was a nice change, and we had a look round the exhibits and watched one of their daily shows in the planetarium which was really good. That was $10 pp, but not too bad overall.

On the way back from there we made a pit-stop in the downtown area to visit a food place called ‘Philippe The Original’ which is the birth place of the French Dip Sandwich. This is what their history says about the place:

“In 1918, in the process of making a policeman a sandwich, Mathieu accidentally dropped the sliced french roll into the roasting pan, which was filled with hot juices from the oven. The policeman said he’d still take the sandwich and left. The next day, the same policeman returned with some friends asking for more dipped sandwiches. The rest they say is history.”

Anyway, it’s a pretty old-fashioned looking place, but really popular and the food was awesome. We had a couple of different sandwiches, “double-dipped” – one beef, and one pastrami.

We stopped on the way back at a massive liquor store, I was tempted to buy this cheap Whiskey 😉

Disneyland

On the third day the weather was much better, more like LA should be – dry and sunny although only reaching around 18 degrees or so, so not as hot as it has been for us for the last few weeks. We are staying around 20 mins walk from Disneyland, and so did a long, full day touring the theme park. We were out for 15 hours total in fact, leaving our hotel by 7am and getting back at 10pm in the evening, with only a brief pause to come out of the park for a beer at the ‘Downtown Disney’ area.

Disneyland in LA is quite different to the park in Orlando, they had quite a lot of rides and attractions we’ve not done before so that was nice to have some different things to do. We’re planning to go to the other Disney park on Tuesday, ‘Disney’s California Adventure’.

Loads of pics below from the day at Disneyland

Lakers Basketball

Today we headed to downtown LA to watch the Lakers play in a home game against the Phoenix Suns. Unfortunately my favourite player, LeBron James was injured and didn’t play, but the Lakers still got a fairly comfortable win at home and it was a really fun afternoon out.

Quick stop for a filthy grilled cheese sandwich after the basketball too – mine had cheese, Mac Cheese and bacon in it!

Golf N’ Stuff

On the way back from the basketball we called at the well-known ‘Golf N’ Stuff’, a massive mini golf, arcade and rides venue that was featured back in the original Karate Kid movie in fact in the 80’s! They had four 18-hole mini golf courses, we played 1.5 of those, zig-zagging around loads of the holes basically to dodge the crowds and slow kids playing. For those keeping tally (I’m not)…. Lucy won 🙂

Tomorrow we are off for a full day at Universal Studios Hollywood, so more pics and updates from our final few days coming up soon.