Vacation Post--Tuesday & Wednesday
Tuesday started super early as well. We were going to L.A. and hopefully touring Paramount, but we couldn't call to make a reservation until after 9. So we took the bus to the train station and thought we missed the train. Some worker guy even told us we missed it. I wanted to cry. Turns out it was just really late. We spent the long ride watching Audition and imagining that we might be seeing the locations in person at some point soon. Called Paramount and discovered we couldn't book a tour until Thursday. We decided to stay the night in Hollywood (which we'd already agreed on and made reservations for) and just come back Thursday morning on the train. So we got to Union Station in L.A. and planned out our bus ride to the EconoLodge on Vine St. Half a block (a huge block, but still) from Paramount Studios and the boys. One long bus ride later, we were standing on Santa Monica and Vine. WOO! So cool. We started walking down Vine toward our motel even though we were too early to check in, but Kathryn and I are both the type who like to know where we're going and be there before we need to.
So we walked by a CVS Pharmacy and stopped in for water, scoped it out and YES. It's the same CVS Glickman shot that video in. That was pretty neat. We browsed mags for BTR, found one that had some good stuff in it. Most of them just had that Justin kid in them. Ugh.
We kept walking down the street and found the motel, but still had a few hours to kill before checking in. So we decided to find Paramount since we knew it was close. We walked ahead to Melrose and headed up the street. After a few mini-blocks, we found it and walked along the front to the main gates. We stopped in at the security desk to make sure our reservations were set for Thursday. I wanted to keep walking right past that desk and just go run amok on the lot until I found the boys. It was surreal to know they were on the same property as us at that exact moment. Left the main entrance and decided to keep walking around the lot because there were gates here and there, and holes in hedges you could peek through, and we didn't know at that time where their soundstages were so as far as we were concerned, we could just peek through at any time and see the boys. As we're walking, we're like... “Hey...these hedges look familiar.” Looked like the same sidewalk where Logan and Kendall were spinning signs in Jobs. Turns out it was! OMG our very first BTR moment! It was insanely exciting. Way more than it should've been. We kept walking around the whole property. Didn't see anything else really, but on the other side of the block we walked past this cemetery and ended up skirting that perimeter as well-and hey, they just filmed there yesterday! So cool.
We killed another hour at Astro Burger because we were hungry and had the time. Wondered if the boys ever eat there. We decided that if they do, they either do drive-thru or have someone pick it up for them because now they're probably popular enough to get recognized. Still, it was cool to be so close to them.
After that we walked back to the motel and checked in. This was our first experience with Hotel Guy. And I'm choking with laughter just typing that. The soup nazi guy on “Seinfeld” is the closest we can come to describing him. He mumbled, spoke bad English, and apparently also had a hearing problem. Poor Kathryn's trying to check us in and kept having to repeat her name and he was like “You're not on the list.” and she's all “It's the last name, at the bottom.” He keeps looking in the middle, and she repeats that her name is the last one. He goes down toward the bottom and stops on the second-to-last name. “I don't see it.” Kathryn goes “THE VERY LAST ONE.” I had to walk away because I couldn't stop laughing. Hotel Guy wasn't amused. She finally gets us checked in and we found our room, and then we crashed for a few hours. Actually, she slept. I wrote some James/Logan and took a shower. Oh, and we got in just in time to watch two BTR eps on Nick, that was awesome. Bad Boy and...Sparks, I think?
We left the motel around 5 to go walk Hollywood Blvd. This wasn't BTR-related, we just wanted to do the tourist thing. It was kind of cool, saw some sights and took some pics and found Nick Studios while waiting for the bus to take us back. We were in a hurry to get back to the room in time for “Unnatural History.” We made it! Bought dinner at Pavilions and ate while watching Henry and Jasper get all sad about their date being broken. Was so cute. After that we watched some BTR on my laptop and researched the Rosslyn Hotel, then crashed for the night.
XOXOXOXOXO
So Wednesday. Let me think. We got up, ate free breakfast at the motel (where we discovered Hotel Guy has won a customer service award and cracked up so hard I could barely climb the stairs), then checked out with Hotel Guy. Oh, Hotel Guy. You will forever make me laugh. We took a bus back down to Hollywood Blvd. Got off just down the street from The Music Box, where the boys played their show in Concert. We squeed like madwomen, took lots of pics. We stood on the sidewalk they ran down when the girls were chasing them. The building where Jo and Kendall put up flyers! We were also on the same corner as Guitar Dude when he's wearing the sandwich board. God, that pic they all took on the ladder! We were right there! It's so unreal. I want to go back.
We finally left, continuing up Hollywood because I was 100% sure I'd seen the Metro station where James and Carlos were tripping people up the stairs in Concert. We walked up and down Hollywood Blvd. again in search of it, but no luck. I thought I was going crazy. Oh, but we saw the guy who plays Mike in the Twilight movies. I didn't see his face, but Kathryn said he looked pissed. So we didn't go back and bug him. He walked right past us. We were waiting to cross Cahuenga and I looked over and saw Sharkey's Mexican Grill, which is Carlos' favorite fast food place. We had to run over and take pics of it. Yes.
So from here we walked to Sunset Blvd. Caught a bus to take us to downtown L.A. where the Rosslyn Hotel is. We planned to switch buses at Union Station, but Kathryn was paying more attention than me and thought maybe we missed our stop, so we got off in a place where we could take another bus. We checked our map and realized we weren't very far from the Rosslyn, and after Kathryn again used her gigantic brain to convince me we needed to go left and not right, we started walking toward the intersection. I looked up and saw the hotel sign and screamed “It's right there!” very loudly. We were like RIGHT THERE. So we walked down the street and took pics, then decided to go inside. We went into the lobby and it's the same lobby from the video, yay! We started to head toward the elevators but there was a group of people waiting and the guy from the desk came over and asked where we were going and I made up some lie about a coffee shop (there had been a sign outside) and he's like “Oh, no coffee shop. It's from the old days.” So we couldn't go up. We were so going to find that rooftop. Kathryn managed to sneak a few pics from inside the lobby and we went out and crossed another street to take pics of the huge sign on top of the hotel that was changed to read “CITY IS OURS.”
We knew our next visit was the train to take us home, and we were sad even though we were going back the next day. We were also hungry, so we had lunch at Subway while bemoaning how much we didn't want to leave. In the end we decided to stay one more night in Hollywood, because it would make it so much easier to get to the tour the next day and because...well...we seriously liked knowing we were so close to the boys. Didn't matter that we never saw them-they were RIGHT THERE DOWN THE STREET. It was too amazing for words. And thanks to tweets from the boys, we didn't just imagine them being there, we KNEW they were there. So we called the EconoLodge (and I'm already laughing just thinking about it) to see if there were any rooms available. Hotel Guy told me there were only one-beds left, and we jumped on it. So then Kathryn called again (because it was her credit card we used) and tried to reserve a room, but Hotel Guy got mad because she kept asking him to repeat stuff (he was so hard to understand) and he hung up on her. Dude, he seriously hung up on her! Customer service, my ass! We figured we'd take a chance anyway and headed back to the motel, where we were able to get a two-bed room (WTF, Hotel Guy?) from the lady that was working the desk. We got dinner at Pavilions again and watched Victorious, then got down to business researching which stages the boys use at Paramount. We were able to narrow it down to 26 & 27 based on interviews, vids the guys posted, and the Paramount website. We figured it had to be those, or at least one of them (turns out it's both, yay!). The rest of the night was spent watching BTR (there's a shocker) and Dr. Who. OMG I LOVED DR. WHO. Totally going to watch more of that. I saw the first episode of season 5, I think? LOVED IT. And we tried to watch the pilot of Supernatural, but couldn't find anything online except a foreign version. I did introduce Kathryn to the Ghost Facer guys, though. HILARIOUS.
And that was Wednesday.