No Access To The Hollywood Sign

April 21 2017

One of the great pleasures of solo travel is meeting up with friends overseas.

I've known MM since the late 1980s when we ran the streets of Sydney with a very rock and roll crowd.  We drank way too much, saw more bands than you could possibly believe, and basically lived the rock and roll life style without making any music.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

MM had actually gone to the private Catholic boarding school that I was slated to go to in Lismore.  I didn't end up going because my older brother told me that I would sleep in a dormitory.  I didn't know what a dormitory was, and although I shared a bedroom with my two brothers, the idea of sleeping in a room with 20 other guys made our cramped bedroom seem very, very private.

MM became a father at a very young age, and somehow he managed to temporarily leave his wife and kids behind and do the old 'drive around the states in a campervan' thing.

He didn't anticipate traffic heading into LA and took some time to get in.  Finally got in around the late afternoon to my place in Rampart Village.

He was keen to see the Griffith Observatory so we headed up to the Hills and started our climb to the top of the hill.  Along with about 1000 other cars who had the same idea.

The sunset was beautiful from the van window but the traffic was out of control as we sped along at 2 inches per hour.  When we got to the top there was no way we could even park so we just turned around and went back down the hill.

Next stop ... Inn-N-Out burger, because: Animal Style.

There were a couple of girls behind us in the line who had such extremely OTT San Fernando Valley accents (who probably adored the Kardashians) that they couldn't have been like, more totally annoying.   We sat down to eat with what sounded like an Aussie Mum and her daughter.  The daughter was eating nothing because she was coeliac (the only type of person who gains any benefit from eating a gluten-free diet).  That seemed weird to me.  The Mum is wolfing down a double double burger and the daughter is just sitting there patiently, watching.

Odd.

Later that night I took MM to a gay bar out of purely selfish reasons.  Poor fella, I'm not sure how he coped with it internally but he seemed OK on the outside.  Naturally I didn't leave more than 30cm space between us while we were there because I was scared that a bunch of vultures might descend on him and tear him into itty bitty pieces.

We got out OK and unharmed.

MM is a budding photographer so we headed off to DTLA to take some cool pictures of the city at night.  My phone camera lens didn't quite have the same resolution but I had a go at taking what Aussies like to call the 'bogan picture'.  I just ran out of patience and this was the closest I got:

After taking too many photos, MM had one last request: he wanted to drive up to the Hollywood Sign.

Again, it fit into the 'it seemed like a good idea at the time category'.  We soon discovered that directions to the Hollywood sign were suspiciously removed from Google Maps.  So I searched for the address, put that into Maps and we headed for the hills.

After driving around for what seemed like ages around the impossibly winding roads along the canyons, we found the spot.  It had a large gate across the access, and some angry looking security guard (don't they all look angry?) came at us, so we just turned around and gave up.

We did find this very cool sign though which summed up the end of the night perfectly: