We only had one full day for sightseeing in Los Angeles, California, but we made the most of it. We began the morning with a continental breakfast at the hotel.
Driving around Los Angeles was a challenge at times. Freeways here, highways there, and a multitude of interchanges. We took a wrong turn more than once. It was only a month after the riots following the verdict in the first trial of the police who assaulted Rodney King, so my grandmother, a nervous woman even at the best of times, constantly worried that it wasn't a safe city to be in. I never felt unsafe while in Los Angeles.
Our first achievement that morning was taking the studio tour at Warner Bros.. Unlike the more famous Universal Studios Hollywood tour, the WB tour at the time was a better look at a working studio and not well publicized, so there were no lines or crowds. It was partly a walking tour, partly a mechanized cart tour.
Batman Returns had been filmed there earlier in the year, so we walked the streets of the still-standing Gotham City sets and even got to stand next to the Batmobile (no photos allowed, sadly). It was fun to see the finished film later, then recognize locations I'd seen in person. As a lifelong fan of comic books, that was one of the high points of the entire trip for me. How many times does one get to walk the streets of a fictional city and see a superhero's automobile up close?
Production was about to begin on Point of No Return, a remake of the French film Nikita, so we also saw some of its sets, which were under construction on a sound stage. I mentioned to the tour guide that I had seen the original version, so she asked me to describe the differences in the set designs for the entire tour group, which I did.
There was a film in production at the studio that day, but it was a closed set and we couldn't get on the set. I was a little disappointed, but the tour as a whole was a brilliant experience.
Next, we went to the Forest Lawn Memorial Park cemetery. Not only are a great many celebrities buried there, but the ashes of my paternal great-grandfather William Edward Anthony Dee are interred in one of the cemetery's columbariums.
In the afternoon, we drove out to Fullerton in Orange County, about 26 miles (42 km) southeast of the city, to meet my grandmother's cousin Pauline, whom she hadn't seen since the 1940s. Pauline was a genealogist, and I had corresponded with her for several years when I started my own genealogical research. Once at her house, she and my grandmother got caught up, and then she and I had a long chat about family history.
Pauline was going to a friend's wedding later, so she invited us to come along as her guests. We did (it was the first and only Mormon wedding I've attended), after which she took us all out to dinner at Denny's. Still playing on her recent birthday, my mother received yet another complimentary meal.
After saying our farewells to Pauline, we returned to our hotel for the night. Before bed, we made use of the hotel's laundry facilities.
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