Take Fountain

I'll say this for Beverly Hills -- it has some of the most beautiful, lushly landscaped streets I've ever seen anywhere. This is Hillcrest Road off Santa Monica Boulevard, where we pulled over yesterday morning almost randomly to turn the car around. Other streets might feature different types of trees, but they all look amazing.

We started the day with breakfast at Norm's near West Hollywood. We wanted an authentic diner experience, and this branch of Norm's was opened in 1957 and remains the chain's longest-operating restaurant. We got a table by the window (pretty much all the tables are by the windows) and I had a veggie omelette, while Dave had a lumberjack breakfast and ate almost all of it.

We then went to chop down some trees in Beverly Hills. KIDDING.

We drove into Hollywood, following Bette Davis' possibly apocryphal advice for hopeful starlets trying to get there: "Take Fountain." (My friend Christopher, who lived in West Hollywood before he died last year, loved that joke. I was telling Dave yesterday that I feel Christopher and Gerry, his late partner, all around me on this trip -- which is to be expected since I visited them here several times.)

We drove along Hollywood Boulevard past the Walk of Fame and Grauman's Chinese Theatre and the Pantages and the Capitol Records tower.

We stopped only to take a photo of this amazing motel sign. We might come back and look at that area more closely, but because we had such a clear, sunny day we wanted to get up to the observatory at Griffith Park to check out the views.

Of course half of Los Angeles had the same idea, so parking up there proved to be a challenge (and cost $10 an hour), but we managed to get this breathtaking vista of downtown and everything to the south and west. This is a pano shot taken with my phone, and you'll have to enlarge it to really get a sense of how much we were seeing, all the way to the Pacific Ocean on the right.

Here's a shot taken with my big camera. (Yes! I brought my big camera, with which most of these pics were taken.) Note the people walking one of the park trails below the observatory at lower right.

Behind us was the legendary Hollywood sign, up in the hills. The observatory, you may remember, was the setting for some of the critical scenes in the movie "Rebel Without a Cause."

We saw these acorn woodpeckers on our walk to and from the car -- and we heard yellow-rumped warblers, a mockingbird and a dark-eyed junco. (I know this because of my Merlin bird app!) There were also several hawks soaring overhead.

We had to get back to the hotel by noon in order to Skype with Dave's parents on our weekly call. We then ran an errand to Target in Westwood and got some tacos for lunch before coming back to the room and resting a couple of hours. I watched most of "The Graduate" just to refresh my memory of the film after reading the book -- it's surreal to watch it just a mile or so from where many scenes were filmed. (Of course that could be said of hundreds, if not thousands, of movies!)

Finally, last night we went for a drink at The Abbey, a huge gay bar in West Hollywood, which was having a Super Bowl party. We didn't stay long, not caring at all about the Super Bowl. We went to a French restaurant on Melrose for dinner and then came back to the hotel. I got slightly more sleep last night, but my jet lag is still pretty intense!