Stay at home weekend

September 3rd, 2007 · No Comments

I’m not sure exactly how hot it got here this weekend, but if it wasn’t at 100?, it was somewhere close by, somewhere we’d never quite seen it get in our year here so far. The combination of high heat and heavy traffic didn’t sound too tempting for this Labor Day weekend, so we decided to wind down the summer with some local sightseeing and relaxing.

We lazed around all day Saturday, as it was too hot to really do anything, and enjoyed dinner at Cube with Michael and Ali in the evening. On Sunday, we got up early and headed to North Hollywood. After our Warner Bros Studio Tour a few months ago, we were interested to see what Universal Studios had to offer, most of which turns out to be rides based on decades-old movies like Jurassic Park, Backdraft, and Waterworld. It was the Back to the Future eight-passenger Delorean ride we were particularly interested in, actually, as it was on its last few runs this weekend, when it will close for good. I have precious little theme park experience, so the day at Universal was a combination of novel and bizarre. We did just about everything, from the Mummy roller coaster and the Jurassic Park ride to the Special Effects demonstration and the backlot tour. We even went to the Backdraft demonstration and the Waterworld show, which proves that it doesn’t matter what you build; as long as you provide only a limited number of choices, people will go.

Universal Studios

Universal Studios photos.

We had lunch at the brewery at CityWalk, which was itself another bizarre attraction. Wall-to-wall advertising and people, like a combination of a mall and a Disney-fied (Universal-ated?) city street. We had an early enough start that we didn’t get caught in any lines and got out before the day was half-over, giving me enough time to switch gears and catch Shane Meadows’ latest, This is England, at the Regency Fairfax, unceremoniously projected off of a DVD. Good film, though.

Today, we headed to another local attraction we hadn’t had a chance to visit yet, the Getty Villa in Malibu. The villa is in a gorgeous setting, in a canyon looking out over the ocean, and the architecture is remarkable. We enjoyed the exhibits and strolled the grounds for a few hours, appreciating the nearly twenty degree drop in temperature from our neck of the woods. The place is pretty spectacular, and I’m sure we’ll be back again sometime.

Getty Villa

Getty Villa photos.

Tags: Film · Los Angeles