Girl's weekend in California

My friend Aud and I have been friends since high school but had never gone on a trip (other than a shopping trip to say Chicago or something) together.  We decided to take a weekend getaway to Los Angeles in November.  I really needed a break from work and so it was nice to get on a plane and be carefree for a couple of days.  It was only the second time I've been away from Jax overnight, so the trip was probably long overdue.   Our flight there was awful (as in I almost threw up a few times) but our luggage made it and our rental car was ready to go, so we were set.  A quick stop at In & Out Burger on the way to our house and we were raring to go.

We opted to go for a rental via airbnb instead of a hotel for a million reasons, but the last one was that you couldn't beat it for the price.  We rented a two bedroom guest house in the Hollywood hills (as in you can see the Hollywood sign from our driveway) for less than we could have stayed at an average three star hotel.  Yes, please.  If anyone is going to be in the LA area and is looking for a place to stay, I can't recommend Fran & her guest house enough.  We will definitely be going back and we will for sure be staying with Fran.  It was awesome.

view from our driveway

 We did our fair share of shopping, eating and sight seeing.
We got to meet up with some friends from high school as well, so it was a busy trip, but definitely worth all of the planning and time.

We hit up a thrift store that was pretty awesome.  Everything in it was used on some movie or TV show and it listed what each item was seen in. I didn't end up getting the muscle T though. :)

 It was a must to find Patrick Swayze's star on the walk of fame.
It should be noted that it was much harder to find than we thought it should have been.

We stopped at the Grove shopping plaza and decided we needed to eat some delicious looking cupcakes.  While nibbling away, Peter Berg walked by.  Now, growing up, my mom was an avid All My Children fan, so this was a huge moment for me.  He walked by us one more time and I waved like the dummy that I am.  I have to say he looked pretty good for his age.  I remember him on the soaps back when I was in grade school.  Good job, Peter!

In our back yard, that also overlooked Los Angeles

 I have to put this in here, because it was one of the moments that we laughed the hardest during the entire trip.  I'm a pretty clumsy person - everyone knows that about me, right?  Well, we parked in this parking garage at the Chinese Theater and we couldn't find the way to the street level.  We went up and down the elevators a few times and kept coming to different parking numbers, I don't know but it was super confusing.  We decided to take the escalators after about five minutes of being lost and as we were going down, I saw that we should have been going up. I miscalculated how far I had gone down and when I tried to run up the escalator, I fell down.

Escalator - 1; Karen - 0

One of my oldest friends, Dave.  We have been friends for what seems like an eternity and got to catch up for a bit over dinner.

We got to spend some time at the Santa Monica Pier and of course I was wearing these crazy yellow glasses.  Never dare me to do anything crazy, I'll probably do it.  Those glasses made us laugh so hard that our sides ached and we had tears running down our cheeks.  Priceless.

 

This night we got all fancy schmancy and ate at the Chateau with Aud's cousin Rachel.
Rachlel lives in Bruce Springsteen's old house and next door to Jane Lynch.  Her neighborhood is crawling with celebrities, so that was pretty fun to see. 

Now, the Chateau is a place that lots of celebrities frequent, so you can't even bring your camera into the hotel/restaurant, which was a huge bummer, because we literally ran into
Cindy Crawford and her daughter.  It was surreal.

Until next time, California.  Stay awesome!