LA Bob (as in Lower Alabama Bob) travels to that other LA. The hip, glitzy one. This is one of the things I saw.

Did you go up to Griffith Park and the Observatory?  Where I stayed in Glendale was two miles from there so that's the first place I went.  Man there was so much traffic going up there.  
And the beaches from Malibu to Santa Monica and south,  man oh man what monumental traffic.   There is no such thing as free parking anywhere near the beaches anymore.  That's the big difference between there and here.  We can park free all up and down the beaches on Santa Rosa Island.

I was wrong about LA being 10 million people.  That's just the population of LA County.  If you combine Orange County with that,  and it's all one big continuous city,  the population then becomes 13 million.  That's two and a half times more than the entire population of the State of Alabama all concentrated in one city.

Short trip and we did not make it up to Griffith.  Maybe next time.  

We ate at Neptune's in Malibu - free parking! And we bought wine from Rosenthal Winery (just the store no time for a tour of the vineyard) in Malibu. The guy (totally a surfer dude) who sold the wine was from Alabama. Small world.

SheWrites wrote:

We ate at Neptune's in Malibu - free parking!  

I wish I'd known about that.  lol

[edit]  Just looked at a map and Neptune's is 12 miles further out than Paradise Cove which was the farthest up the coast I got.

To give us an idea how big Los Angeles actually is, the distance from Neptunes in Malibu south to Huntington Beach is 75 miles.

Las Vegas is also a phenomenal thing to witness.  Take a look at this...

This is a 68 story,  3900 room hotel/casino on the Strip called the Fontainebleau.  It was topped out in 2008 and then the outfit went bankrupt and it's sat there uncompleted since.  Many of the windows are now broken out and the place is infested with pigeons and other critters.
Over $2 billion was spent on it before it went into bankruptcy.  The financier Carl Icahn then bought it for $150 million and likely will demolish the entire thing to use the land for something else.  



I already knew about the Fontainebleau boondoggle before I got to Vegas.
But I was walking on the Strip one afternoon right near the heart of it where the Bellagio is,  and I see this skyscraper covered completely with a black tarp.  And there were really loud noises coming from inside.
I asked what that was all about,  and learned this was to be a 48 story hotel/casino called the Harmon.  After they got 19 floors of it built,  it was discovered that the foundation was flawed and it couldn't pass the building codes.  So unbelievably they are now disassembling the thing piece by piece to tear it down.  They can't do an explosive demolition because it's too close to the other hotels right near it.
Only in America!  lol