Los Angeles, CA

Los Angeles is one of  the world's most popular travel destinations. I say LA is the dream city for many. It's the Mumbai of USA or we can say Mumbai is LA of India. 

We visited LA twice within a year. Reason? you'll come to know later. It was just before the Thangsgiving weekend when we planned a short trip to LA. I was not confident with the 6-7hrs drive to LA, so we took a flight on early Saturday morning and reached LA around 8-9am. 

Directly from the airport we drove to re-live Gaurav's graduation days at University of Southern California, USC. We walked around the campus, re-living memories and had our breakfast at Jamba Juice Cafe.

After going through Gaurav's memory lane, we headed towards...

yes, Universal Studios, Hollywood!

101 Hollywood

entering the Universal Studios Hollywood

The Universal Studio

different 'sets' for movies and other shows

we went to stone age with Flinstones!

We had a lot of fun at the Studios the whole day. Everything looked familiar as we have seen those in movies and TV. It was so much fun relating and recollecting the sets, movies, daily soaps, the characters in each and so much more. It was a windy day with slight showers and as a result I was down with fever. We took an early dinner that evening and went to our hotel near Disney Land. As we have to have some drama in our trips, my fever shot up quite high and Gaurav had to go out in mid-night to get some medicine. In the morning,   I was all set to enjoy Disney Land :) . Lesson learned : we should keep some basic medicines for emergency.

Now its time to visit the dream land, Disney Land!

Disney Land, where dreams come true!

the castle

the Disneyland map

the entrance and train

Mickey's Toon Town, we saw it alllll...Mickey's house, Minnie's house and her backyard, Chip n Dale's tree house, Goofy/Donald/Daisy...we saw everyone's home from inside and out...I was soo excited. Since childhood (till date) I am a Disney fan, so when everything and everyone was around me, I was lost in my childhood again. I can go there AGAIN. :)

we with Mickey Mouse, yes the real one :)

there are some young angels with Pluto

Goofy at the door!

Minnie Mouse

these were just 2% of Strollers in Disney Land that day

and of course, balloons and more pretty balloons

Finally comes the famous Disney Parade, which is a must see when you in Disney Land

(watch the video below)

Disneyland Thanksgiving Parade 2010

this video is via Youtube, 

we were too busy in enjoying and clicking the stills of parade to take a video!

the Castle at night

This was the end of our first trip to LA. Now lets share our second experience

My Aunt came to Toronto, Canada for a month in May 2011. So we planned to visit her in near mid-May. We applied for visa after booking tickets for 11th May. Now finally the day arrived to fly, but guess what, we didn't get our Visa/passport yet! So we cancelled the tickets and thought to wait till weekend. Now weekend was here, and there was still no clue of our passport yet. After much thoughts and several visits & calls to USPS, we decided to drive to Canadian Consulate in LA and find out whats the issue.

So around 9am Sunday morning we took I-5 towards LA and reached around 3pm. There we had already booked a hotel for a night in Downtown LA, near the Canadian Consulate. Since it was Sunday, we decided to take some rest and visit some more places there in the evening. 

started with Beverly Hills drive, 

believe me, there was nothing to see!

the famous Hollywood

and of course, the Santa Monica Pier

The next morning we had an early appointment at the Canadian Office. There we came to know that their system was being upgraded, hence they couldn't process our Visa application. How can be they so irresponsible. Cause of their so called upgrade, we lost so much. Anyways, let it be...this too a lesson learned . Well the lady at the consulate told us that they will issue our visa in couple of hours, so we had more time to roam around.

yes, our last destination was Hollywood Walk, Kodak Theatre and Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood

After these few last sight-seeing, which was not so worth we took lunch and back to visa office. So finally after getting our visa, we started to drive back to Sunnyvale around 3.30pm. But story doesn't end here. Yes, after about 45miles back to north on I-5, we missed the I-5 exit! and realized after around 50minutes that we are on wrong way! I know we had GPS, and luckily signal was also NOT lost, but I was busy chatting on Facebook with my Mom! Actually we stopped for coffee to be awake and then we realized that we are on 99South instead of I-5. It was late, it was dark, we were sleepy and we took the wrong way! We started singing, no-no shouting Bollywood songs (which were on our stereo) to keep ourselves awake and took a U-turn back around 45miles to join the lost I-5. Thankfully this time SB (Gaurav's elder brother) was keeping our track through Google Latitude. Wow technologies! Finally we reached home around 11pm which was 2hrs late than scheduled. Lesson learned : never chat while on road, keep your GPS 'ON'.