Off to Beverly Hills

This morning we woke up and went to Denny's for breakfast. Breakfast is my favorite meal of the day, my only wish is that Denny's had veggie bacon on the menu!

After breakfast we headed off to Beverly Hills. There were a few places that I had wanted to visit like Rodeo Drive and Crumbs Bakeshop, but I also wanted to see the famous Beverly Hills sign and find something on it that said 90210.

We got into the neighborhood and you immediately knew that you were in Beverly Hills! It was just like on tv. The houses are all HUGE, there are palm trees lining the street and Ferraris and lamborghinis driving around!

I took the picture standing up and hanging out my car, so it's not very good. But it really was beautiful.

After finding a place to park, we headed directly to Crumb's Bakeshop. I've been reading all about Crumb's on the cupcake blog i read (Cupcakes Take the Cake) and everyone raves about this place. It's flagship location is in NYC and it's well know for their over-sized cupcakes.

Directly to the left of this photo was the street sign for Rodeo Drive. I took a picture of the shop and the sign together, but the sign is so small you can't even read it, so why bother...

This is their front window:

And this is what we ordered:

Joel had the keylime pie on the left and I had the lemon meringue on the right. It was a hot day, they were so refreshing! And the cake and frosting was delicious! And everyone is right they are really big and we could have easily shared one. But we didn't. And we couldn't easily gone for another. They were THAT good! My only complaint about this place is that the flavors have weird names like "Courtney Cox" and that doesn't tell me anything. If the names are going to be obscure, they should have a description.

And we walked around for a few hours and decided to head back. The stores are too expensive, though Joel did leave with two new pairs of pants.

On the way out of Beverly Hills we did see the sign:

Happy Independence Day

Today is the Fourth of July and it's supposed to be a day of celebration. However, I was just really happy to have a day of relaxation! We woke up and headed out for breakfast. The day before we had driven by Portola's Bakery which was really busy so we thought we'd check it out. It was really busy but we scored a seat outside in one of the sidewalk tables. We ordered egg and guacamole croissant sandwiches. Yum! The wait was a little long and Joel got upset about not knowing how the service worked, but overall breakfast was great.

After leaving breakfast we made a quick list of where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do for the day. We were quickly frustrated when we realized that most things are closed for Independence Day. So we decided to do something not shopping related. We headed towards Mulholland Drive. This was such a fun, twisty, turny drive it reminded me of one of my Mini runs. The houses along this road were amazing too, multi-million dollar homes with breathtaking views.

There were a bunch of places to stop along the way and enjoy the view so we took advantage of that. But it was SOOO hot out and I could feel my skin burning! It got to the point where I was really cranky from the heat and being thirsty and having to pee! That I just wanted to go back to the hotel for a nap. So, that's what we did. We put the AC on and relaxed in the room for a few hours. Sometime later in the night Steve got off work and wanted to meet up and we were starving for dinner. So we went to P.F. Chang's in Burbank for dinner. I got some teamed veggie dish with rice. It was ok. Too expensive for such bland food. After that we had some Pinkberry frozen yogurt. Supposedly, Pinkberry was the first frozen yogurt place and everyone compares all frozen yogurt to this place, but we thought it was just average. We definitely like our neighborhood place better! Joel wanted to see some fireworks so Steve suggested that we drive down to Santa Monica to see if we could see some from the pier. I had never been there, so I was pretty excited to see somewhere new. However, I knew it was going to get chilly and really wanted to change into pants and sneakers. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a place and was feeling pretty miserable. Luckily, as we started walking around I warmed up and was able to enjoy myself. There were a ton of people out but no fireworks. Supposedly they stopped having it several years ago. Oh well, it wasn’t that far of a drive and it got us out of town. After we got back to Burbank we headed over to the bar to have a few drinks before calling it night. Another good day.

Day two of our Road trip to LA

We woke up in Bakersfield and wanted to get a relatively early start. We were out of the hotel by 8:30am or so and headed over to IHOP for a nice nutritious breakfast. yeah right. But it was good, and we were hungry.

After getting back on the rode I took a good look around and noticed how much we really were in the middle of nowhere. I have made this trip once before, but forgot that it was so barren out here.

Absolutely flat and yellow as far as you can see. I could not imagine living out here. I thought I was from the middle of nowhere. The traffic was non-existent until we got closer to LA so that made the trip much more bearable than last night.

Our destination was downtown LA. We were headed to Joel's brother's apartment. I didn't have my GPS so we had to rely solely on my phone map, what a disaster! But we made it finally around 12:30pm.

We parked my car and Ben and Katy drove us around. Which was awesome, because gas is super expensive and they knew where they were going. We ate lunch at In n Out and then headed over to one of the cupcake shops that was on my list of places to see, Yummy Cupcakes.

Yummy Cupcakes is in Burbank, CA and it's a really small shop with two rooms. The first room has all of the cupcakes on display and the second is a small store with cupcake gifts.

The people inside were very nice and answered al of our questions about the flavors. Between the four of us we decided on five cupcakes. We got Shirley Temple and Red Velvet with chocolate and Vanilla Cream Cheese frosting:

And Ben and Katy chose Vanilla/Vanilla, a snickerdoodle flavor, and I think the third one is called Happy Day? Like a birthday Cake type flavor.

The cupcakes were delicious! I wanted to go back and buy more flavors but we had other stuff on the day's agenda. My only complaint about this place is that their to-go packaging sucks. Luckily we weren't traveling far, otherwise the cupcakes would have fallen over and became a mixed up frosting mess.

Next on the list was Johnny Cupcakes. I have known about this place for years now and have always wanted to go but the location has always been too far away. So this trip to LA was perfect for scoping out the new store.

This is the entrance to the store on Melrose Ave.

When you walk in they have a display case of t-shirts immediately to the left and then these cool display ovens are up on the wall. I want an oven like that in my kitchen!!

This big oven in the back is the door to their back room. And on the wall they have the story of how Johnny Cupcakes came to be. So neat! And I only walked out with one t-shirt and two stickers. But I wanted more....

After doing some more shopping on Melrose at Urban Outfitters and American Apparel we headed to the grocery store for some barbecue shopping. We ended the night barbecuing on Ben and Katy's roof in downtown LA. Great end to a great day!

Oh, and we had no idea where we were going to stay for the night. We didn't book a hotel because we weren't sure which area we wanted to stay in. Luckily, Steve came through for us and hooked us up with an AWESOME room in the Burbank Marriott. Joel's very lucky to have such great friends and family.

Road Trip to Los Angeles

Today Joel and I left for Los Angeles after working all day. I don't know which one of us thought it was a good idea to leave the bay area at 4:30pm. But damn, that's what we did and I regretted it just 15 minutes into our long six hour drive! After driving in bumper to bumper traffic for 2 straight hours, I made the mistake of looking at my odometer to see how far we had driven. 2 hours in and 55 miles down. OMG! This was going to be a long drive. I honestly don't even remember when we made it out of traffic, but after driving on I-5 which is a two lane highway for almost 7 hours we decided to call it a night. We decided to stop at the first hotel sign we saw which ended up being somewhere in the Bakersfield area. There were two hotels to choose from, the Best Western and the Rodeway Inn. Best Western was charging $110 and Rodeway was charging $60. No contest, Rodeway Inn it was.

We got into the room ad the air conditioner was off. Uh Oh. It felt like it was 110 degrees in the room. We promptly turned on the AC and I did my inspection of the room to make sure it was clean. I entered the bathroom and screamed! There was a HUGE spider hanging in the shower!!! So I called Joel in to catch it. After fighting his way into the bathroom through the massive spider web, he was able to save me by getting rid of the yucky thing. Ugh. After the room cooled off we were able to get a decent night sleep.