hollywood adventure

on thursday, i took my niece on her birthday present adventure day. she has been, and still is, fascinated with hollywood. i took her to the heart of hollywood to see the major hot spots and as a bonus, i had gotten two tv taping audience tickets for the disney channel show, "pair of kings". she was super excited about the whole day. i had it all planned out for fun and food and to make it in time for the taping.

we ate lunch at mel's diner and we went to the hollywood wax museum and to the chinese grauman's theater (where the hand and footprints are). we saw a lot of stars on the hollywood walk of fame. we also saw our fair share of crazies too. we saw elvis, transformers, darth vader, the black swan ballerina, and many more. hollywood is known as hollyweird...

the highlight of the day was seeing the harry potter cast's handprints and footprints in cement. she said that it almost brought tears to her eyes when she placed her hands in their hands. we saw flowers and candles at elizabeth taylor's cement spot. we saw the el capitan theater and the pantages theater. we saw the hollywood sign and capitol records. we even had time to spare as we made our way to the tv taping, or so we thought.

we get there at 2:30 for a 5:00 taping. we were #26 and #27 in line. the way it works is they take all the VIP's that come for the taping and however many seats are left are what the rest of us in line get. let me set this up for you. we are waiting in line in the cold and windy and rainy weather. i didn't bring our jackets because it was sunny when we got in line. i didn't want to get out of line to get the jackets so we made due. sienna used her umbrella to block the wind and cold. her and the girl in front of us, both 10 yrs old, started chatting like they were old friends. we were trying to keep warm and just counting down the time until we could get inside. the workers told us that they couldn't guarantee us a spot, but that it looked good. the line starts moving and wouldn't you guess that they stopped at the group of 4 in front of us and said there was only 2 spots open and that they would have to rotate 2 and 2 between shots to be able to get in. that means that the line officially stopped right in front of us. i was speechless. i wanted to cry because i was cold and frustrated and so sad for sienna that she wouldn't be able to get in. on the walk back to the car, she just stopped and started bawling her eyes out. poor thing. it was definitely emotionally draining on both of us. i even tried to get us cheap last minute tickets to see beauty and the beast at the pantages, but they only had $100 tickets left. things weren't looking good.

we decided to just have a nice dinner and take our time home to avoid the downtown LA traffic. we ate at CPK and were joking that as we ordered our food, the waiter would say, "i'm sorry, but we just ran out of that". he didn't though and we had a great time together. it was cold and rainy, and we definitely had stories to take home with us. an unforgettable hollywood adventure.