I managed to get only a couple of hours sleep last night. My body is on Australian time. Obviously this will take a few days to sort out. In any case we were up and away early to make the most of our time here! We stay in Residence Inns when we are traveling. They are the budget part of the Marriott Chain. Their accommodation is reasonably cheap and usually comfortable and the cost of a continental breakfast is included in the tariff. We went down to breakfast and chose to sit beside the pool in the outdoor area. It was already quite warm so this was a beautiful setting for our first full day in LA, especially as we had come over from our own winter. I decided to give the American coffee another try however after one sip and needing to retrieve my eyeballs from the back of my head, I decided that it still was not for me. I am certain that I will not be drinking that pig swill again.
The breakfast area was quite full of patrons. Being Fathers Day in the USA and given that a lot of schools are on their Summer Vacation, the budget chains are no doubt full of families traveling. That did seem to be the case here as hoards of children filled the dining area, and stuck their fingers into every single orifice, and every plate/bowl of food on the buffet. I decided to stick with cereal (for the record....Granola....it is the absolute best!). Children were running in and out of the dining area and the pool area which we found quite annoying but felt that patience was a virtue. They were noisy which is expected given that they are loud-yanks-in-training. As I had only a few hours sleep and was totally out of whack, I felt the beginnings of a headache lurking and the yelling and squealing of these kids was not helping. I decided that I would try to block out the noise and enjoy the beautiful weather before we got on with our day. As there is music piped out into the pool area where we were eating our breakfast, I tried to focus on it as I would normally do given the exact same circumstances back at home. There was some sort of Mexican music playing with a heavily accented female singing. That type of music is the norm over here given the large Hispanic population and there is evidence of that everywhere that you go. I am not particularly fond of this music - well ok, I hate it more than I do bananas - however given the current circumstances I was prepared to listen to it in order to drown out the rest of the noise.
As I tried to focus on the lyrics being sung....I was fairly certain that I heard the woman singing "three blind mice". I raised an eyebrow and shook my head, thinking that I must be hallucinating due to lack of sleep. But there it was again...."three blind mice". I asked the Bear if he could hear what I could, and yes, he could. And there we sat, completely sleep deprived, with children screaming and yanks being their loud selves, listening to a Mexican or Hispanic woman singing "three blind mice" followed by a very shrill "here we go!" before apparently seeing how they ran. *sigh*
We did not wish to waste any time despite wanting to take things fairly easy on our first full day in L.A so we decided to head into Rodeo Drive. We had not gotten out for a walk along there when we where here last year and it was definitely something on my to do list. I mean I would fit in there like a glove on a hand. I definitely would not look like a fish out of water. Much! I wanted to be frowned on like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. I wanted to tell some arrogant shop attendant that she had made a big mistake in not serving me! Good grief...I need to lay off the television!
As we approached Rodeo Drive we saw that the streets were blocked off. At first glance it looked like a movie was being filmed there as there was several cars parked incorrectly, and a lear jet just parked casually up the street. I thought this was fairly cool and was immediately devising ways to gate crash a movie set. However this was not the case. It was a display celebrating he 50th birthday of the lear jet so for obvious reasons we wanted to have a look. We could only find paid parking underneath one of the buildings around the corner from the Beverly Wilshire Hotel and found ourselves sharing a lift with a man who was obviously filthy rich and wanted to offer us money to take their President. I said that I didn't want money, and that we would be very happy to take him if he took our Prime Minister. He was happy to make that exchange and had we have had a lawyer present, we might have struck up an immediate deal that would benefit all Australians.
Walking along Rodeo Drive it was clear that the people were beautifully eccentric. They were just awesome. Big mouths, big wallets, big boobs....and lots of dogs! All of the dogs were clearly very pampered and spoiled so they were right up my alley. I couldn't however figure out why one German Shepherd wore a pair of flying goggles. His "family" looked relatively normal. We literally stumbled across Jay Leno who looked like he had a potential lawsuit ahead of him given his ridiculously dreadful fake tan. I am not a fan however had a level of admiration given that he wasn't pushing the whole star status and remained remarkably patient whilst other people wanted their photo taken with him. I considered it...but figured he wasn't famous enough for me to piss him off demanding a photo with him or else he would need to wonder forever more whether his toothbrush met with foul play during the day.
From there we drove back to Crenshaw to visit my beloved Walmart. By this time however my headache was bad enough not to be enjoying the bargains that ay in front of us. We did buy a dachshund shaped sausage cutter (I didn't even know that there was such a thing! In my opinion, a knife does an ok job!) for $3. I don't eat sausages, but hey! It was a dachshund! We left Walmart with relatively little, with the promise that we would return when I was feeling up to it.
We decided to stop by a supermarket to buy something for dinner as we really didn't have it in us to eat out. We stopped at "Von" which was the same as the "Pavilion" supermarket that we bought our salads from last year. With that we returned to our hotel to eat and catch up on some much needed sleep. We have a huge day planned for tomorrow!
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