Back in LA

After a brief, enjoyable stay in the desert, we headed back to LA on Thursday morning. Gary wanted to be back in time to give some workers directions, but we did pause for some shopping at an Outlet Mall on the way in.
To get to Bel Air from the desert, one must drive right by downtown LA, so we got some nice views of the city, including the Hollywood sign and the Staples Centre.

While Gary did some required work at home, Bill & the girls set out to the valley - The San Fernando Valley - do so some more shopping. Shoes, a Target and another visit to Trader Jacks were on our list. Trader Jacks really has some unique products including Napa wine for $1.99 affectionately called 2 Buck Chuck, since the vintner is Charles Shaw. We had one of his chardonnays the other night and it's not half bad.
We cooked some pork tenderloin on the indoor grill along with a 5 minute, from frozen, risotto from Trader Jacks that was excellent. Following that we tried to watch Nights in Rodanthe with Richard Gere & Diane Laine, but all fell asleep, so that was another day in California.
Friday morning, Dawn & I set off on our own, since Betty & Gary had responsibilities at the house that required their presence for the day. Our destination for the morning was Warner Brothers studios in Burbank. It was a relatively short drive and we managed to catch an earlier tour than we had booked.


The two hour tour started with a short movie highlighting Warner Brothers film history, which is substantial. Then we headed out to the city street scenes with facade buildings that have been used in many different movies with many different dressings. The one more recognizable facade was ER's hospital entrance.
Then we went to the house scenes where many houses like the Seavers' and Drew Carey's were found.
Next we headed into the sound stage area where movies from My Fair Lady and Casablanca to TV shows like the Mentalist and Cold Case are/were shot. In fact, both of the later mentioned TV shows were setting up for a shoot latter in the day. No stars were viewed, but we did see Ellen Degeneres' parking space and George Clooney's cottage. We also walked on to the sets of Friends (Central Perk) and The Mentalist. We couldn't always take photos, I guess to protect the stars.


By the time we finished the tour, we looked for a restaurant across fro WB studios called the Smoke House that has quite a long history in the area.
To go home we avoided the Freeway and instead, chose to drive through Griffith Park to see the Greek Theatre and The Griffith Observatory. The Observatory provided the best views of the Hollywood sign and if not for today's smog , great views of the city.


From there we drove along Mulholland Dr. back to north of Bel Air. Along the way, there are many spectacular homes and some pretty scary ones on stilts.

We did pretty well finding our way around the town today and got back to Linda Flora right on schedule for cocktails and artichoke hearts. The three vegetable highlights of this trip have definitely been the three A's - Avacados, Artichokes and Asparagus, all presently in season, so we've been eating lots of them.
Tonight was surf and turf with lobster tails and fillet - another shabby meal!

A Desert Day

After a late night last night, things got going slowly today, which was fine. After some wake-up time,Bill broke out the bacon and eggs and a great breakfast was had by all. Brenda & Bill's house above , by the way, is the one with Gary's white Explorer in the driveway.
This day was our discovery of Palm Springs, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert and Cathedral City. These cities are all in a strip through the valley, one blending into another. Everything is low and spread out. We stopped at Jenkins, a fine food store and a consignment home furnishing store which were both interesting.

Then we drove up out of the valley to the surrounding hills to get a good look at the valley below.
For lunch, we chose a Palm Desert restaurant again, this one called the Daily Grill. Great lunch!

The day finished off with a swim and hot tub back at Brenda and Bill's, since the temperature had once again hit the 80's. Cocktails followed shortly and the day ended with a salmon dinner at their house. I could get used to the desert!

Into the Desert

Tuesday morning, we awoke to power being back on after about 5 hours without it last night. It was promising to be a beautiful day weatherwise, but since we were heading in to the desert, we were pretty sure the weather was going to be magnificent anyway.

Our route took us past downtown LA so we took a little diversion to an ethnic shopping area called Sante Alley, which reminded us a lot of the European markets. Dawn & Betty managed to pick up some goodies in our brief stroll through the streets filled with shops spilling out into the streets.

It was actually only slightly more than 2 hours to go from Bel Air to the town of Cathedral City. We drove once again through the impressive area of windmills around Palm Springs. The power from these apparently power Palm Springs.

Thanks to Mapquest, we found Brenda & Bill's place with relative ease and spent several hours catching up around their pool. The temperature by the time we arrived had hit 83 and we were eager to eat up the heat.


For dinner we went into Palm Desert to the Pacifica restaurant specializing in seafood, which we all had. We pretty much closed up the restaurant and then returned to Brenda & Bill's to share some lively dialogue on the state of the world.

Hollywood Stars

The day began very early - in fact, as we were driving into Hollywood this morning, the day had definitely not begun. We were up at 4:30 and parked at the Hollywood Bowl by 5:40 and why? We were going to Oprah Winfrey's post Oscar Show at the Kodak Theatre, home of the Academy Awards. Gary is to be commended for finding these tickets on line from someone who couldn't use them.This was a guaranteed star sighting. Of course, going to this theatre meant leaving cameras, pagers, phones, etc. at home - therefore no in-theatre photographic evidence.

As we were waiting in the line waiting for the shuttle to take us to the show a mere few blocks away, we were also reminded to leave umbrellas in the car. Got a present for Oprah, leave it in the car. A script idea - car. A book idea- car.
There were two parking lots full of people going to the show - clearly the Kodak is one big theatre - a couple thousand I'm guessing. After standing in line in the lot for a couple of hours, we took the short bus ride to the Kodak, went in the back door due to a still closed Hollywood Blvd. in front of the theatre and proceeded to stand for another couple of hours to wait for the doors to open.


When we finally got into the theatre, we found ourselves with good seats in the middle of the first mezzanine and we continued to wait for the 10:00 start of the show. Although the show is taped, it is live-to-tape, which meant that the one hour show took one hour to tape - no retakes.
So, our first star was David Foster who was in the audience since, as a pre-show special, we were treated to two songs performed by Oprah's latest find, the 16 year old Charisse, who is recording with David. Then came Oprah! She was great and kibbitzed with the audience off camera.
We didn't know the star lineup for the show, except Hugh Jackman who was first. After last night's Oscars and Hugh's great song & dance work and Slumdog's 8 Oscars, we had a new appreciation for Jackman and on the show he was even nicer.
Next came Kate Winslett, then Sean Penn, Penelope Cruz and finally the cast and director of Slumdog Millionaire. The show finished with a musical number from Slumdog. We felt extremely fortunate to be in the audience for this show and the early hour and long waits ended up being worth it.
We chose to walk back to the car, which was only a 10 minute walk and then famished, since it had been too early to have a serious breakfast, we set out in search of lunch. We settled on an Italian restaurant in Beverly Hills, Il Pastio, and all thoroughly enjoyed our pastas. Following lunch, we rolled down to Spago, Wolfgang Pucks' high end restaurant and as we stopped across the street from the restaurant, first Sidney Poitier and then Rob Reiner got out of their respective Mercedes and went in for lunch.


In Beverly Hills, it's one Rolls & Bentley & Aston Martin after another, but the 1/2 million dollar Rolls coupe that pulled up to Spago's front door was definitely worth sharing on the blog.

We had a slow afternoon, in fact a quick nap, before we revisited the Oprah show on TV that we'd seen live. We felt that Sean Penn came across better on TV than he did live, as he talked very quietly and was hard to follow. We all agreed that it had been a great Hollywood day!

Getty Centre

We awoke to dull skies again today and wondered if the stars were going to get rained on at the Academy Awards. The blimp could be seen hanging above Hollywood. Any plans for today had to get us back to B&G's before the red carpet coverage.
So, we coasted down the valley to the Getty Centre.

Admission to this museum is actually free which is amazing for such a dynamic museum. After parking, we took a tram up to the museum. There are several display halls, numerous walkways and gardens making up the site. There was some very interesting art work including impressionists, sculpture and furnishings and because we were fairly early, the crowds were not intrusive.

From the Getty, the views of Hollywood & LA and nearby Bel Air, plus the Hwy.405 running north to south were exceptional. We also had a different angle look at Betty & Gary's place, below.


Following the Getty, we did In-N-Out again for lunch and then back to the ranch for the Oscars. Being in LA for the Awards is very cool, but of course our chances of getting close to the Kodak Theatre today were nil, so like everyone else in the world, we resorted to the TV.

The house tour

Saturday is supposed to be a lighter traffic day in LA - not this weekend. The Academy Awards have, it appears, brought above normal volume to this city - that and a major golf tournament. Of course we expected LA traffic to be crazy, so getting caught in some was kind of a tourist event.
Today was devoted to checking out the houses that Gary & Betty had redone in the past and that took us from just down the street to the Pacific Pallisades. We also set out to discover LA's best wine shops.
Betty & Gary have been busy since they moved to LA in 2001. With each house that they bought, the complexity of the makeover increased, until the current house that bears very little resemblance to the original structure. This the house in Pacific Pallisades.

Along the way we continued to be barraged with a huge number of VERY high end cars, like this this new Rolls.

Following the house tour/wine discovery expedition, where one of the three wine shops visited did have an amazing range and quantity of wines, verses the others that had primarily high end product, we took a long stroll along Venice Beach.

This is a very long wide expanse of sandy beach, bordered by all variety of tourist shops and services including tattoos and psychics. It was also packed with the masses, interesting considering it was overcast and not particularly beach weather.
It was an interesting walk and a great source of exercise.

We ended up close to Santa Monica Pier where the Independent film awards were going on in a tent set up along the beach - no real star sightings today, except the girl's apparent sighting of Rita Wilson at Shutters, a hot beach front hotel.

The day ended up with a great meal back on Linda Flora and another movie, Bottle Shock, appropriately about California wines making their mark on the world of wine.

LA Day 2

Of course with the 3 hour time change, I woke at first light and was ready to go. I did however stay in bed and did some further research into the celebs who were on the plane with us yesterday. It was indeed Tanya Kim, but the guy was actually Roz Weston from ET Canada. No doubt they were coming to LA for the Academy Awards this Sunday.
Betty & Gary's Belair home on Linda Flora Dr. is on the side of a hill overlooking the massive Getty Museum complex, downtown Santa Monica and of course the ocean. When they bought it, they basically gutted it and raised the roof to get main floor and second floor high ceilings. Although the landscaping is not complete, the house is a spectacular showpiece, ready to go up for sale next month. Given market conditions, they don't expect a quick sale.

This picture is their house looking through the front gates. It was taken at dusk last night so the gas lights can be seen.

We spent most time last night, where else, in the kitchen.
I went about the house this morning doing video, because I'm not sure stills of any particular area will do justice to what a nice job they've done of restoring this place. Anyway, the next three pics are the living room, the view from their balconies and the house from the back.



After breakfast, we did the local tour - Bel Air, Beverly Hills and surrounding neighbourhoods. The opulence here is remarkable. There appear to be no properties for under a couple million, but there are also lots in the 20-30 million range and even some in excess of 100 million. And, there was major construction and regular maintenance going on everywhere. There clearly is still lots of employment for labourers here. We saw the Playboy mansion property but not much of the mansion itself and the 35000 square foot Spelling mansion.
For lunch, we did the In-N-Out burger place in Beverly Hills and then picked up a few meal ingredients and wine at Trader Joe's.

We spent a quiet afternoon back on Linda Flora, made pizza for dinner and watched the Reader (Great movie) to finish off the day. The weather here today was a very pleasant 70 and mostly sunny. If we're lucky, there'll be more of that to come.
The final pic here is Betty & Gary's place coming up Linda Flora.

California

So, it's still wintering seriously in Canada and we've chosen to escape it for a bit in California.
We flew from Toronto today at noon today - actually 1:30 once they replaced our broken plane- and had an excellent flight with our first celebrities of the trip from the E-talk show - Tanya Kim & her boy toy reporter - don't know his name.
We met Betty & Gary at LAX and proceeded to their digs in Bel-air. NOT SHABBY! No pictures today - lots tomorrow!