After exploring the USA’s West Coast
two years ago, we felt
like we had to pay a second visit to fill in some blanks.
We left Antwerp Sunday 7AM to touch down 25 hours later in
LAX, after an eight hour cross-Atlantic flight to Newark and a six hour overlay
waiting for a connecting flight.
We were welcomed by a rental car salesman who strongly advised
us to upgrade to a bigger SUV which would give us tinted windows since it’s
gonna be hot, you know. After politely blowing him off, we drove off to our
first hotel. Arriving at an airport motel, we got to check off the clichés with
a lost empty beer bottle in the room, and us playing ‘the stained carpet is lava’.
We started off our first day with a real American breakfast;
eggs and steak. Saturated, we continued our path to the California Science Center,
driving through LA’s colorful suburbs. Arriving there, we found the highly
welcomed Space Shuttle named
Endeavour in its retirement home. We also visited the IMAX theatre,
which is always worth your while. This time we got to see
Blue Planet. We
followed this up with a small lunch at LA’s real farmer’s market.


Yesterday we took part in a Warner Bros VIP tour. With a
group of only eleven, the guide did a great job making the tour a lot more
intimate than the one Universal offers. Cruising through the outdoor sets, he
emphasized once again how fake everything is. A small patch of grass serves as
Central Park; outdoor stages can be stripped down and rebuilt to go from 18th
century San Francisco to nowadays New York in a couple of days; leaves are
plucked from trees to make it Winter and sewed back on to fast-forward to
Spring; cracks are drilled into new pavements, and patches of tar are put on,
to make them look worn out. Besides the outdoor stages we got a close look at
the Big Bang Theory set and the retired Friends props, we even got to sit on
the famous couch. Our final look behind the scenes went to the retired car
museum, which was a real treat for me as a Batman fan, since it housed all
Batmobiles, even the Tumbler.


After that, we drove up to Hollywood Boulevard, to be washed
over by thousands of tourists walking around Hollywood’s two most famous theatres
- the Dolby (former Kodak) theatre, and the Chinese theatre – just to stand
where the stars once stood.
After nightfall we drove up to the observatory,
just to put the size of LA in perspective. We were also hoping for some
romance, but so were hundreds of others apparently.
Today we left central LA for Santa Monica and Venice Beach.
We started our boardwalk in Venice Beach, embracing beach culture: street performers,
medical marihuana offices, hustlers and amateurs pumping iron at Muscle Beach.
Next up; San Diego.