Today is our final day in LA and because we are flying home this evening we decided that we would sort of take it easy so have booked onto a tour of the Hollywood Homes of the rich and famous. We were picked up at the hotel and taken to the tour office where we then go on another minibus ready for the tour. Thankfully we had booked a tour in a van with a top although it didn’t have windows it did have a roof and to be honest looking at the people that had booked the open top tour I am really glad we chose the one we did. We started by driving up into the Hollywood hills for a view of the Hollywood sign which originally said Hollywood Land as it was advertising housing in the foothills, in 1949 it was refurbished to just say Hollywood and has been updated 3 times in its lifetime the last time it was renovated was in 1978. It looks quite large but not massive but the letters are actually 33 feet high and 10 feet wide which is larger than some houses! We then drove round and looked at North Hollywood which is actually the other side of the valley and spreads quite a long way, you also get quite a good view of the ‘studio’ area where Warner Brothers and Universal are housed, looking down from the top of the Hollywood hills it just looks like a lot of warehouses but they do have a replica of Hogwarts Castle which stands out quite well. After the drive round Hollywood hills it was time to drive round and see some of the houses, we had been a bit worried that they would point out a lot of houses of people we didn’t know but as you are basically only being shown the driveways of houses they were of people we had heard of such as Rod Stewart, Vinnie Jones, Carrie Fisher and Joan Crawford. Unfortunately because the houses are owned by people with a lot of money you don’t actually get a very good view of them and to be honest they are not in a location I would buy a home in if I had a spare 10 million or so. However from the hills we drove down into Bel Air which is where the original stars such as Frank Sinatra, Lucile Ball and Greta Garbo had homes and although they are all quite close together is definitely somewhere I would consider buying a home if I had to live in LA. The final part of the drive was around Rodeo Drive and Famers Market which we had done the other day but it was interesting that on a Saturday it is both a lot busier but also there are definitely more ‘cars to be seen in’ out and about. We actually say 2 McLaren’s which is 200% more than I have ever seen, only one was moving, the other was parked but they still look rather impressive. The tour ended back where it started then we were driven back to the hotel, by which time it was about 12:30 so we dropped our things back in the room and went out for some lunch. We decided to go to Mel’s Diner again as it is an American institution but this time we sat outside and watched the world go by. Then we went back to the hotel to have a bit of a relax before packing, having a shower and heading out to the airport for the flight home!
