Sleep, glorious sleep! We slept in until 10 am to compensate for our early mornings while camping the past week. After freshening up packing we loaded the car and hit the road at 11 am to make our way to LA for the weekend. We took I-40, which is parallel to Route 66, the majority of the way before merging onto more Californian roads. We were in California by 11:40 am and passed through an inspection station shortly after to make our way to Hollywood.

We needed to stop for gas, and because we were in the middle of the Mojave Dessert there weren’t a lot of options. We looked up gas in the area and found Najah’s Desert Oasis in Essex, California. The station was pretty cool – it had flamingoes, a fountain, a little restaurant…BUT GAS WAS $4.99 PER GALLON!!!! Far and away the most expensive we’ve seen and probably will see on this trip. We had to suck it up because we needed to fill, at least partially until we came across something cheaper, so I paid $33 for about 6 1/2 gallons which got us what we needed.

Driving through the desert was intense. It was on average 101 degrees according to Alex’s car. It’s a desert, so our surroundings were what you’d expect – mountains, sand, bushes, sand, heat, mountains, sand. We got hungry, and in Salina, Utah I had wanted to go to a Carl’s Jr. because I had never been before, so in Barstow, CA we stopped to have our first burgers. They were pretty good, standard fast food burgers. The people were really nice (“my pleasure” was all the woman at the register responded to us) and the restaurant was kept in nice condition. Solid first experience.

After leaving at 2:30 pm we made our way further to LA, of course getting caught in some construction and other traffic, but we managed to get to Matt Beilinson and Jena Eisenberg’s apartment in Westwood around 5:30 pm. We eventually found parking, met up with Matt, and brought our stuff up to their place. Jena wasn’t home yet, so it was just the lads. It was great to see Matt. Alex saw both of them in Miami in May or June, but I hadn’t seen either Matt or Jena since they visited Wekeela in 2013. Fun fact – Matt came up with the name Pigeons. What a legend.

We left their apartment to meet up with Jena at a Korean BBQ restaurant for a 6:30 reservation. Jena had just gotten off work at Fox Studios in time to meet us for dinner. I think I had done Korean BBQ once before. They brought out tons of small dishes that were really good though we had no idea what many of them were. The meats and seafoods they cooked were awesome, and the meal wasn’t overly filling.

After dinner Jena and I split off from Matt and Alex. Matt and Alex traveled around Hollywood and checked out the theater and walk of fame etc. Jena took me to the 27th Simpsons Premiere Party at Universal Studios. It was so cool!! It was at the Simpsons theme park section of the Universal Theme Park, but all of the games and food stations were open and free! Jena saw some people she knew from work, I think I ran into the guy on the food network that hosts Chopped, but otherwise it was just a fun Simpsons-themed party. We were there from about 8:30 – 10, and when we were exiting the park to drive back to Jena and Matt’s we realized we were driving next to Nick Offerman, aka Ron Swanson. AHHHHHH SO COOL!!

Diddy Riese was our first stop once we were back in UCLA territory. This local place is famous for offering custom ice cream sandwiches with their incredible home made cookies. I got mint chocolate chip ice cream between a peanut butter cookie and chocolate white chocolate chip cookie. So good. We walked and ate and got back to their at midnight. We hung out some more, Jena and I watched an episode of The Office, and we fell asleep at our massive slumber party around 1:30 am.

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