Hooray for Hollywood!

Jet lag is a bitch. Wide awake at 4am! 😳

Started the day with a delicious breakfast of brioche French toast covered in whipped cream, dripping with orange-flavoured maple syrup, berries and mandarin segments. Decadent, rich and absolutely ravishing.

We bought a daily Metro bus ticket ($5) and used Radical Storage ($20) to stash our bags for the day — which just happened to be inside a West Hollywood liquor store! So us! 🍷 Such a clever and inexpensive idea, letting us explore Hollywood without dragging luggage everywhere.

Mark was slightly worried we hadn’t been given any receipts and that our bags might disappear forever. I reassured him it would all be okay…

We then made the pilgrimage to Hollywood and Vine to track down the three stars 🌟 Mark absolutely had to see on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and Betty White (from The Golden Girls). It took a surprising amount of investigation, but we finally found them and got the photos to prove it!

From there we wandered to the Dolby Theatre, home of the Academy Awards, then onto the TCL Chinese Theatre to look through all the celebrity handprints. We found Judy Garland and Meryl Streep amongst the collection. There’s something strangely fun and nostalgic about hunting down your favourite stars.

We knew we wouldn’t have time to get up close to the Hollywood Sign, so instead we kept catching little glimpses of it between intersections along Hollywood Boulevard.

My personal favourite moment was finding the Las Palmas Hotel — where Julia Roberts’ character Vivian is “saved” at the end of Pretty Woman by Richard Gere’s character, Edward, using the umbrella to pull down the ladder and “save her right back”. Still one of the best lines from the film.

By the way, Hollywood Boulevard itself is a complete and utter hot mess… really dirty, chaotic and nothing like the polished image you imagine from movies 🎥

And yes… we did what we had to do and caught a Waymo driverless car. It felt completely surreal sitting inside while the steering wheel turned itself. The future has definitely arrived 🪐

We headed to Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, which was probably the one “too much” mistake of the day. We were starving hungry and everything felt completely OTT — wall-to-wall designer stores like Chanel, Dior, Prada and Louis Vuitton.

After about five minutes we looked at each other, summoned another Waymo, and got the hell outta there! 😳😜☀️

I also finally got to see the Holloway Motel — the very first overseas motel I ever stayed in on my first overseas trip 30 years ago. It’s now operating as a homeless shelter, which I actually think is wonderful, but standing there revisiting the location brought back such an overwhelming feeling of nostalgia. The first place I ever stayed outside Australia… 30 years ago!

It’s difficult to properly explain how excited we both are to simply be in another country, 🇺🇸 walking around on a beautiful sunny day, experiencing all these strange, funny and wonderful little moments.

More than anything, we just feel incredibly grateful and humble to be sharing such a wonderful moment in time!Read more