Los Angeles & Hollywood

Left home around 8:00, we were almost onto SR-14 when we started hearing noises from the bottom of the BMW. I guess the skid plate is loose again, we stopped and checked it, but there isn’t a whole lot we can do about it right now. The flight from Portland to the Orange County John Wayne Airport was uneventful, I managed to bust out the colored pencils and finish up some more of my Washington State History worksheets.

When we got into the airport, we realized that it was farther away from USC than it looked on the map. We found a shuttle van that would take us to our hotel, the Radisson Midtown Los Angeles, across the street from the USC campus and the admissions building, for $65. Not cheap, but its still $35 better than a taxi. The driver was Iranian, he moved to the United States to finish school when he was 19 and never moved back. Now he has 2 kids at UCSD.

After checking into the hotel and making arrangements for a transfer to the airport tomorrow afternoon, we walked around the USC campus. I’ll describe it in more detail tomorrow after the info session and formal tour, but I think it is going to be hard to get a good feel for it since it’s so empty right now. I must admit this wasn’t unexpected; I visited the East Coast schools during our Spring Break, while they were in school, but this is the middle of summer for everyone.

We walked all over campus, and then we returned to our hotel for a break. My phone works very well here (well, as well as it does anywhere) but mom’s phone can only find AT&T and Cingular signals, so I guess it really doesn’t matter that her battery is almost dead. Still, I think it’s weird that my phone works better than hers for finding signal, even with my loose antenna.

We took a taxi up to Universal Studios and walked around the City Walk. The driver almost ran out of gas on the freeway when we got stuck in LA rush-hour traffic (aggravated by an accident where a semi-truck hit a small car and ran into the median) but we made it. It was just closing time for the park itself, so we just looked in the gates and got a picture by the fountains at the entrance. They had the Delorean on display that was used in “Back to the Future” and other cool stuff. After we finished there, we walked a few blocks to the Metro station and rode down a stop into West Hollywood and Hollywood Boulevard. We saw the walk of fame and the prints outside the Chinese theater and all the touristy sites along there before heading back to the hotel for the night.