Hollywood!

With Lane's job, he flies a lot of weekends. He doesn't get to pick where and he doesn't get to pick when. This weekend we got lucky and he was just going to be a few hours from home, so the kids and I joined him and took advantage of getting to be with Daddy while he was traveling. He flew up to Burbank, CA on Friday and the kids and I joined him on Saturday. He had a flight Saturday evening, so the kids and I went to check out the mall that was just down the street. I was excited because everything was within walking distance. I might have missed my long {8 mile} run on Saturday, but I did lots of walking over the course of the weekend so I'm not counting it as a total loss! Before heading to the mall we checked out the courtyard because I saw that there was a waterfall {Eden's favorite thing at Mimi and Pop's house!}.

When we got to the mall I found Bath and Body Works and got a wallflower for our hotel room. I think this is going to be a must for future hotel stays! I loved walking into our room and having it smell better than "hotel" smell. The hotel didn't stink, but it was nice to walk in and have a smell that I wanted to smell! After that quick stop I saw that there was a playground. I'm a huge fan of a playground at a mall! Hunter is moving around well enough that I let him get down and roam too. The downside to this is that I can no longer just sit and watch Eden play, I have to follow him around because he'll put anything and everything into his mouth. If another kid has dropped anything, Hunter will find it. If he finds it, he will eat it! I think it's funny that my kids were drawn to the 2 airplane toys that were there!

He didn't have to fly at all {though he had to make tons of calls and be "on call" for different things} on Sunday so we made the best of it and did the tourist thing. We went driving around Hollywood {to check out the walk of fame}, Beverly Hills {with our map of celebrity homes in tow}, and around some of the studios that were near by. We had a blast and I enjoyed being able to spend the time with him that is normally time we have to spend apart.

First stop, Price is Right studio {even though they weren't open!}. We also drove by the WB studios, but again, just drove by because it was Sunday, nothing was up and running.

After that we went on a hunt for the Hollywood sign. I did get to see it, it was impressive, but we didn't go to one of the "best places to see it" as listed by many-a-websites. We were at a stop light while driving to Hollywood Boulevard and I saw it, got excited, took a picture, and looking back, it's not near as exciting to look at as I was in the moment! And this is the cropped version of the picture! Told you, not near as exciting as I thought it would be looking back. I am glad, though, that I got as excited as I did when I first saw it.

Once we saw the sign, got a parking spot on Hollywood Boulevard we set out to look at the stars on the Walk of Fame. We saw some cool ones and we saw some who we had no idea who they were. All in all, it was impressive and I'm glad we did it.

After we were done with the stars, we decided to drive around and see some celebrity houses. We weren't able to see any of them except for the gates to their houses. We could see the address on the street and we saw the gates to the houses, but not the actual house. I wasn't shocked by this, but still wish we could have seen more. At one point we were stuck on a hill in Beverly Hills and couldn't figure how to get out because the roads were all blocked. Come to find out, that was where Obama was having a fundraiser lunch, so the area was completely blocked off. We drove around for a while and we were able to see Dane Cook's, Phil Collins', Ringo Starr's, David Spade's, Halle Berry's houses in addition to Reggie Bush:

and Ellen Degeneres:

While we drove around Eden watch the Lion King in the back seat and Hunter slept. It was nice to just have a few moments where it was "just" Lane and me! There was no way we would make it to all the homes we wanted to visit because look at the map {there were other homes and areas on the back side of the map too!}

We only made it to the very top right corner of the map and that still took long enough for Eden to watch an entire movie!

Even though we only did a portion of the map, the views and homes while we drove around were stunning. The homes were huge. The cars in the driveways were amazing. Pretty much, it was spectacular.

I have a feeling that Hollywood is a been there, done that type of thing for us though. If people come to visit and they want to go, we'd be happy to do it again, but I'm pretty sure that unless we got tickets to a studio tour or something cool like that we probably won't go back up. I don't know, maybe we'll try to get back to get a better picture/view of the Hollywood sign. I'm sure there's more to Hollywood than what we saw, and after all, there are many, many, many more homes we could go scout out!