The Hollywood Sign Debacle

Following on from my last post I thought I would share our adventure on the way home from WEGO Health’s Rookie of the Year Awards which were held in Washington DC. We had to fly home via LAX, if you have ever been through LAX, it’s my nightmare airport, so much so that rather than endure the stress of a transferring between flights I decided to do a stopover.

As such the 36 hour LA adventure was born.

You think I would start at hour one and move on from there but I am far from normal so this time we will start with the last 12 hours of the adventure. We had been planning this part since locking ourselves in our Air B&B basement in Baltimore after looking at the crime stats and the shootings in the last week outranked our last ten years.
We are hikers, as in we love nature and don’t mind walking. So we were thrilled that to get close to the sign, a decent hike was required. We choose the Brush Canyon Trail, a 6.4 miles round trip with 1,050 feet of elevation change.

This trail would have taken us by the Bronson Caves, a man-made cave in Griffith Park that is most famous for the Bat Cave in the 1960’s and has since been used for such films as Army of darkness, Scorpion King, more Batman, a Star Trek and many other well know movies and series.

Best Laid Plans

_{The trip should have looked like this.}

We had to check out of our hotel at 11 am and wouldn’t have access to a room until we arrived back in Perth 24 hours later, so the fact that LA was in a heat wave was not a great start. To save ourselves a small portion of the trip we had decided to catch an Uber to the start of the trail, a mere 2.4 miles and ten minutes from our hotel. So at 11 am we left our luggage in a somewhat questionable hotel clerk and got in an Uber Pool vehicle.

_{The trip actually looked like.}

Just under an hour later our Uber driver declared he was lost and dropped us at the nearest viewpoint, which happened to be The Griffith Observatory, an 8.8 miles round trip, the exact distance it would have been if we had just walked from our hotel. It would have taken us less time to walk the 2.4 miles than it took the Uber driver to get lost and drop us in the wrong place. The most annoying thing was that we had to bypass Bronson Caves and missed seeing an iconic piece of Hollywood.

The Full Debacle

Not to be deterred from our original goal of reaching the Hollywood sign before getting on the plane that evening we set off from our new start point in a somewhat frustrated mood. This soon moved into a WTF were you thinking mood as the heat increased and the winding trail seemed to never end.

I mean we have seen the sign did we really need to see it close up…

View from the Observatory

Besides being a perfect viewpoint for those not wanting to hike to the Hollywood Sign, the Observatory is pretty astronomical in its own right. It was opened in1935 and was the vision of Griffith J. Griffith, who left a directive in his will when he donated the land to the City of Los Angeles to build not only the observatory but a planetarium and an exhibit hall full of science and space-related displays. All with the goal to make astronomy accessible to the average person, which is why to this day there is no admission fee.

Warnings along the way

In Australia, we have our fair share of deadly animals but rattlesnakes are not on that list. I find it slightly amusing that a deadly snake has a tail that could be mistaken as a baby’s toy.

Halfway!

Celebrate! Actually, there was no celebrating, there was, however, no turning back as either way entailed a long dusty walk. It was also quiet, we passed many people walking back and others walking slower than we had time too, however, no one said hello to each other and often no acknowledgement was given when we said hello. At first, you could pass this off as maybe they didn’t hear us but even after speaking up and trying the ever jolly “G’Day” we were lucky to get a response from one in ten groups we passed and even then it was one person in the group not the group as a whole that responded.

Made it!

It looked much bigger in real life… I promise…

A hot sweaty mess but we made it, we had planned to walk right to the top and view the sign from behind it but due to time and water limitations, we decided to cut our losses and venture back down through the Hollywood Hills.

This throne was found outside this amazing fairy garden, unfortunately, it was closed and had signs asking you not to take images without being granted entry. In Australia, not many decorate for Halloween so it was super fun seeing all the houses.

I couldn’t help myself…

At the base of the hills we got a bit lost and decided to take the risk an Uber out, I know what were we thinking…

Although she did not get lost with us in the car, she did get lost on the way to pick us up and took 15 minutes longer than planned and then had the audacity to lecture us about how locals hated having tourists in the Hollywood Hills and why didn’t we do something better with our time like visit the museums.

Didn’t we know we could have seen the sign from Airport drive…

I can tell you that after the first Uber trip, the extended hike and the heat I was not in the mood to be lectured about what we should be doing on our whirlwind trip. I told her we would have to agree to disagree and didn’t speak the remainder of the trip to the hotel. By this point, I was so annoyed with Uber that we sourced the bus to the airport, saved ourselves loads of money and still arrived at the airport in time for dinner before flying out.

In short, yes she was correct you can see the Hollywood sign from the airport but that is not the same as seeing it close up. We set ourselves a goal and achieved it in spite of the challenges faced. It was worth it and a win for the good guys.

As always thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed one of my odd adventures and stick around for the next.