Sep
22
Destination LA: Universal Studios
Filed Under Uncategorized
Finally, LA. Its our first full day in LA and since Brad is at work our plan is to immediately hit up Universal Studios. We were also hoping that since it was a Friday it would be less populated, and it would break up the two theme parks since we were planning to do Disneyland on Monday. Our plan worked perfectly, parking was super easy, the crowd was small, and there were no wait times over 15 minutes, and most of the rides and shows were at 5 minutes or no wait.
Welcome to Universal Studios City Walk. This is where they have their restaurants, stores, and general entertainment. (Movie theater).
You can see how big the city walk is here, they have a lot of awesome stuff and its really just as fun as being inside, its a different kind of fun, but still really cool to look around.
They have almost every big chain you can think of, Tony Romas, Bubba Gump, Buca Di Beppo, and even Cinnabon which you can see in the left of the picture above.
Us enjoying the City Walk, about to head in.
The sign you’ve arrived.
Woody the Woodpecker, the first characters I saw so I took a shot of them. I never realized how silly that name is till just now when I had to type it.
So we walk in, were chatting and looking at the various sights, guess what the first big attraction is? Thats right, the House of Horror. You can see there is absolutely no line, there is nobody even close. So Danielle has to go into this thing, she loves the haunted houses, they are her favorite thing.
We don’t have any pictures of the inside, but it was spooky. There were dead bodies hanging from the ceiling (hopefully fake), there was a Chucky doll that would rush at you as you walked by it, and even people in costumes walking around scaring the poo out of you.
After that, we decided we had to do the Universal Studio tour, its like the main event there, so off we went.
Here’s one I took while in my little tour bus.
This was the view from the start of the tour, you can see all over the different studio’s from here. Warner Brothers is that big complex off to the right, and paramount is supposed to be dead center, somewhere out there.
The studio tour is cool because they actually film movies right on location there. Here’s some pictures from the tour, I bet you can make out movies from some of them.
The Who Village.
Here you can see the Who Village right next to an old west house and buggy.
This is supposed to be the Bates Motel from Psycho. They are doing some work on it because they are having a Haunted Halloween event at Universal Studios and its a place for one of the parties. That would be scary to be at a party in the bates motel where they programmed things to jump out at you at random. Ugh, my heart couldn’t take it.
This of course is War of the Worlds.
Not sure what movies were filmed here, but those dudes standing around were stunt men. They did some shooting and explosives, with the guy up top in the middle falling down on to that black thing below him.
I took this picture cause we had to wait here while a film shoot up ahead was finishing. You can see a house up in the distance on the right that is just half a house, it kinda weird but indicative of studio towns I guess.
After that we tried to give you guys a call, but the phone booth didn’t work.
So we did some of the other rides, T-2 3D, Jurassic Park which totally splashed us with water, and Backdraft.
This is us right after the Jurassic Park ride, we were totally wet, so we went to the Backdraft show, which was all this fire and stuff, so we hoped to warm up and dry off.
Another of us while we were waiting.
After the Backdraft show, we got a Churro Sunday (yum) and sat in the sun. We also looked at this kind of Museum they had.
Here’s a zombie from the museum that was trying to attack Danielle. Whats funny is that later we saw a Zombie guy that would act really weird for people to get a picture, and then he would roar and chase the girls and they would get super scared. It would have been really good if this was him and he roared at Danielle, she would have screamed.
We needed a rest, so we had some Pizza, talked, and then finished off with the last showing of Waterworld.
This was a great show, lots of lame action, and bad dialog, but the guy there on the bottom who is in the show was funny. He had a can of water and would squirt people as they walked by, lots of fun. There were green seats, and silver seats, with the green seats being places where they would basically try to get you wet. We ended up sitting 2-3 rows back from the green seats and still got drenched. Oh well.
Here’s a shot I took of the rides and their wait times. Sucks the wait times didn’t come out, but you can still see all the cool rides they had.
At the end of our day they had this little European square where we sat to rest.
Hello! That’s me on my iPhone, which I did some internet surfing on while Danielle talked to her mom. And that was the end of Universal Studios. We did see one more cool thing along the way, which was this guy.
This was one of those fake flying tubes that you can do aerial acrobatics and get what its like to do skydiving. He was awesome, it looked like normal people were doing it, but he was the only one that got to really go high up as the others seemed like they were told to only go within his reach.
Well, that was an awesome day, and it was only our first full day in LA. We had the whole weekend to chill out, see the sights, and Disneyland on the horizon.