Southern California

HOLLYWOOD AND BEVERLY HILLS

Having arrived in Southern California by American Airlines plane on a flight from Dulles in Virginia with three travel companions as a continuation of our long tour in the U.S.A. At Los Angeles airport, where we disembarked, we got on a shuttle bus of the National Company that took us to the car rental place where we had booked the car from Italy. From here we picked up a powerful SUV equipped with many accessories, some of which we did not even use.

While it is true that due to the particularity of the multi-lane and lightly trafficked roads both the automatic transmission and setting a constant speed are very useful, we considered it inadvisable instead to use the onboard phone; who knows how much it would have cost us!! We have left behind the days spent on the eastern part of the country, bypassing by plane the great monotonous prairies, and we find ourselves in a different environment, certainly more Latin, less orderly. Even the colors of the sky and the vegetation are different, and with our car we are entering one of the most extensive cities in the world, Los Angeles. The center of the city, which in the States is called downtown, though I do not see how it could be called the historic center since they are all very modern skyscrapers, we see from the highway wrapped in haze.

We have seen skyscrapers in New York and those have no equals in the U.S.A., so we head directly for Hollywood. Los Angeles is not a city in the European sense of the term but many cities put together connected by broad highways, and among these Hollywood is one of the most famous. The car's satellite navigator takes us immediately to a motel, from which after taking possession of the rooms we comfortably reach The Walk of Fame. It may well be a tacky visit, but it is inevitable to come here and take a stroll along this avenue where the stars with the names of the most famous figures of American cinema are inlaid in the sidewalks. Along the avenue stand the modern shopping center that houses the theater of Oscar night, where we park in the vast garage, and numerous theaters.

Among these, the most famous is certainly the Chinese Theatre, which in front of the entrance resembling a pagoda displays the famous hand and footprints of the most important Hollywood stars since the days of black and white. On the avenue, which is in fact a part of Hollywood Boulevard, there are souvenir shops, wax museums, and many street artists; some do break-dance and others imitate film characters like Marilyn Monroe. We leave this area full of tourists for Sunset Boulevard; the irregularly laid-out avenue was once the site of the sound stages of the film companies, then when these grew larger they were forced to move and it became the street of clubs frequented by Hollywood stars, then it suffered a slow decline, and finally it has recently been revitalized.

Now there are many places for all tastes, from the one owned by one of the Blues Brothers, very popular and located in a sheet-metal shack, to the luxurious restaurant. We choose to have dinner in a western-style wooden place with waiters in cowboy hats and excellent steak served with a baked potato in foil and butter. It will be one of our best American meals, one of the few times when the dish was not ruined by absurd little sauces!! After dinner we take a walk in Beverly Hills among very luxurious shops; we are the only users of Rodeo Drive because at this hour the businesses are closed and the area is deserted. From the architecture of the buildings, the care of the gardens, the cleanliness, and the presence of the major high-fashion brands, you understand that this is the VIP street of Los Angeles.

We have had an intense day made up of walking around the city and 4,000 km of flight; we reach the motel to sleep.

UNIVERSAL STUDIOS AND SANTA MONICA

The next morning we get up early; last night we got a ticket for extending parking after the meter time ended, and we pay it immediately at a Western Union!! We then go to the hill that hosts the Universal Studios, that is, the sound stages of the famous film company, flanked by a Disney-style theme park. You cannot go to the States without seeing at least one big amusement park, and Los Angeles offers a couple, but we avoid Disneyland because although it is the first in the chain it is also the smallest and too similar to EuroDisney. The Californian Universal Studios moreover are, at least in part, unlike those in Orlando, Florida, real film studios. The entrance to the actual Park is preceded by a long row of extravagant shops selling knick-knacks and food, with very distinctive and brightly colored facades.

Once inside the Park we immediately get on the rubber-wheeled train that takes us on the tour of the sound stages. The vehicle travels along a road that first descends and then climbs the hill, skimming the industrial warehouses that house film and television productions. In some of these hangars we enter to watch and take part in recreations such as an earthquake and the attack of King Kong. Outside we see some important sets: the motel from the film "Psycho," the devastating scene of a crashed plane from Spielberg's "The War of the Worlds," the City Hall from "Back to the Future," the harbor from "Jaws." In just a few hundred meters you go from the reconstruction of a New York neighborhood to an Italian provincial town complete with a Carabinieri station, from a Parisian avenue to a flood in a Mexican village.

At the end of the train tour we tackle the visit to the Park's attractions, starting with Shrek 4D, a film in which not only does the cartoon seem to come out of the screen but the chairs vibrate, you feel the blowing of the wind, and the spit of the characters hits your face; in practice the film is three-dimensional while the fourth dimension is the sensory one. In Jurassic Park-The Ride, which you reach by going down the hill on a long escalator, you get into a large boat that after wandering among animated dinosaurs plunges headlong into a body of water. Terminator 2:3D presents a three-dimensional film in which the characters not only seem to come out of the screen but materialize on a stage. The House of Horrors is a walking route where, along with terrifying mannequins, the only thing that really frightens you are some costumed actors who unexpectedly try to scare you.

Universal's Animal Actors is an amphitheater that offers a show of trained animals. Backdraft shows how fires and explosions are recreated in cinema. In the nearby Special Effects, a host explains some special effects while interacting with the audience. Fear Factor Live is the recording of a television show very popular in the States in which some contestants challenge each other in tests of skill and courage, sometimes even disgusting ones like eating worms. The only truly interesting attraction, however, is Waterworld, in which stuntmen recreate a very spectacular scene from the film with daredevil jet skis, dives from considerable height, fires, and explosions. After finishing the visit to the Park we take the car and find lodging in a motel, realizing that we have been in Hollywood for two days and still have not seen the famous sign.

In the evening we go to the Santa Monica waterfront and have pizza dinner in an Italian restaurant on the commercial street. We then return to the motel for the night.

LOS ANGELES AND CALICO

The following morning we finally manage to see the Hollywood sign placed on an inaccessible hill, and despite the haze surrounding it we photograph it, then we leave the urban sprawl of Los Angeles for inland California. As soon as we leave the city, the desert takes over, that is, an uninhabited region with sparse vegetation. After a few hours we stop at Calico, one of the many ghost towns in America, all with a common story: born out of nothing near a mine and abandoned when the vein ran out. Calico, being on the connecting road between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, is much visited and consequently is in excellent condition; it preserves several original restored buildings and some faithful reconstructions. The atmosphere is the classic Far West one, and everything is in perfect period style, from the sheriff's house to the jail, from the post office to the school.

There are souvenir shops, pastry shops, and coffee shops, but all strictly western. We also visit the small mine, the museum displaying photos and objects from when Calico was inhabited, and the little station from which a train departs for a short tourist ride, which we skip. We then resume our journey, leaving California for Nevada, destination Las Vegas.