Universal Studios
We’re staying at a great hotel here on Santa Monica Beach and last night we were treated to a perfect southern Californian sunset, with those trademark long tall palm trees silhouetted onto a postcard pink sky. It was glorious!
We had to book two rooms here so we have a boys’ room and a girls’ room. The boys, it appeared from their knock at our door somewhere in the region of 6am, seemed to have slept well. They were off on an exploratory tour of the Santa Monica Pier. The girls, however, were struck by the curse of the upside-down body clock, not helped of course by Maisy’s constant coughing, and were up for a midnight feast and chat which lasted for about 2 hours! Ben and Julie are a couple of floors down from us and they slept pretty well except for the fact that their room, supposedly on a non-smoking floor, was next to one of the only smoking rooms in the hotel! Ben said he smelt like a nightclub when he woke up this morning! Hopefully the smokers will check out today…
We headed off relatively early and braved the public transport system to get ourselves to Universal Studios. We are amazed at how many homeless people live here. There was a guy who got on the bus with us, who had all his belongings in a garbage bag. It is pretty sad. We caught a bus, a train and a shuttle bus and an hour and a half later, arrived at beautiful Universal Studios. The weather today was HOT!!
We enjoyed going on the studio tour and especially seeing the 3D King Kong show in the tunnel. In Will’s words “that was AWESOME!!” Since Halloween is coming up soon, they were gearing up for a month of horrors and there seemed to be an abundance of grotesque and macabre sights around the place, which was a little unsettling for Maisy and Will. Everywhere you turned there was a cartload of “dead” bodies and the gift shop was even selling an array of severed limbs! Nice.
We also ventured onto the Jurassic Park ride and the Mummy rollercoaster in the dark and we saw behind the scenes secrets on how all the special effects are made. Toby was picked to go up on stage to beat his chest and roar like King Kong in front of 1800 people! He did a great job too! The MC of the show got another volunteer up on stage to do a few lines from some Arnie movies and asked him to speak in his best Arnold Schwarzenegger “Australian accent”! There are so many Australians here too. He insulted us all! Everywhere we turn we are hearing Aussie accents and we reckon about half the population of Universal Studios was Australian today. We have a nice family from Victoria staying in our hotel.
We got the bus, train, bus combination home again and Maisy fell asleep on the bus. We are all totally exhausted now and ready for a full night’s sleep. We had room service for dinner, which the kids loved. Hopefully the body clock will kick into action soon!
