FRIDAY 2ND MAY 2025

Looking back, the Los Angeles Hyatt Andaz Hotel in West Hollywood will prove the most luxurious of the next four stays up to Washington DC, where we are as I write this. The hotel was built in 1963 by Gene Autrey – the Singing Cowboy – and has retained a rock star connection ever since. Even the lifts/elevators are decorated as LP record sleeves. And a display of boots decorates the entrance foyer.

Our room is huge. It has a lounge section as well as a bedroom section, with a view across neon-lit Sunset Boulevard to the LA hills and famous Hollywood sign in the distance.

A la carte breakfast is included and wait service very smooth. We still have to sign off the bill though, and OMG! Around 100 US Dollars each day for eggs, juice and coffee. It may be “free”, but somewhere along the way we paid for it. Oh well, we’re along for the ride now. It’s an odd choice to illustrate this post with the receipts but I’m including them for the sheer curiosity of it.

The pity with having such luxury is that we are actually on tour. We left everything in the hands of Railbookers, the Australian agent for Amtrak Vacations, and their first schedule of this morning is a “Tour of the Celebrity Homes”.

We grabbed a taxi to our starting point and a good portion of the fare was created because he couldn’t do a u-turn on Sunset Boulevard. His “drive around the block” took us along narrow, uphill, winding roads lined with leafy greenery and pretty houses. This was my first introduction to how residential living is entwined with the glitz and glamour of Los Angeles’s busy main roads.

Our tour starting point turned out to be close to the hotel, and right outside the Dolby Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. (We later tried to get a tour of this historic theatre but for some reason there were to be none on the days we were in LA.)

Anyway, here we were. Right on that famous strip lined with the names of celebrities and all the glamour associated with that, and to be honest it looked dirty, touristy and just plain sad. But it was still relatively early on a cold and gloomy day. When we returned a few days later it looked brighter.

The tour took us into the hills and along roads such as Mulholland Drive, made famous in the movie LA Confidential. Our guide reeled off the names of the various areas but since I don’t follow the lives of the rich and famous that didn’t mean a huge amount to me. More it was the sense of vastness around the city proper and how hilly it was that struck me. The scenery was the redeeming feature of the tour for me. Other than that I wouldn’t recommend doing it. I heard movie star gossip I didn’t need to know,  looked at a lot of hedgerows, and got very cold and sometimes wet in the open touring vehicle.

Next on the schedule we were to meet friends of a friend. We were to make our way to their house at the foothills of the Hollywood sign, hike up to it, and dine together afterwards. For various reasons the plan was delayed, then eventually cancelled, leaving us with unexpected free time.

We wandered around the Dolby Theatre complex without being able to view the actual theatre, and managed to photograph the Hollywood sign in the far distance. Then we realised our hop on/hop off bus ticket (another Amtrak Vacation inclusion) was for 24 hours rather than a single day – so we rescued the rest of the day by jumping on that.

We like to do these buses on arrival in a strange city as a way of orientation. In this case, the bus concentrated on the Hollywood section of LA: Beverley Hills, Melrose, and so on. We discovered downtown for ourselves a couple of days later.

I had some other photos for this section but WordPress wont locate them on my phone. As it’s now the end of May and we are in Niagara Falls I’ll give up on that. They weren’t fabulous anyway 🙂