Hollywood

We went to Universal Studios after San Diego (we bought a City Pass so it had all of these things included) and had a lot of fun. Alli and I played in the Curious George play area while everyone else went on a different ride. She had a lot of fun, they have some really cool areas for kids. I was pretty impressed. We didn't take too many pictures, but it was pretty cool. We went on the studio tour through a bunch of the sets. It's crazy all the things they can do to make things seem different than they are-height of doors to make girls look smaller and guys look bigger, re-creating plane crashes, simulated floods/fires/train wrecks. One part you go into a "hot set" where it's all set up for filming and there is a whole sequence of disasters. We went on Jurassic Park, but our favorite was by far the Mummy ride. It was so much fun! With the whole child switch thing I think Ryan and I each went about 5 times. We saw the Shrek 4-D show they have, and the Waterworld show. The cool thing with the Waterworld show is they have some well-known actors/actresses who are just on a break with their show. The main director of SVU from Law & Order was in the show as well as the main actor on Castle, some guys from CSI NY, and a girl from Grey's Anatomy among a few others. One thing I definitely took for granted before this trip that I appreciate much more now is clean air! It seemed like (ironically enough though the tour guide on the train was commenting how you can't smoke anywhere in California anymore) we were smelling cigarette smoke so often. I just hate the fact that you smell it from so far away so you smell the smoke and then find the smoker and figure out a way to get farther away. Well how is that for a random tangent! :) Another fun show at Universal was the Animal Actors show. It is so amazing the personalities of these animals and how they come out in the funny things they do. The dogs were pretty cool, but our favorite (and Alli's for sure-she wanted to watch the whole show again to see it) was the chimpanzee!