The End

Our flight from LA didn't leave until 11pm on Wednesday 4th January, so we had to fill in a whole day. As Sam was still feeling poorly, Jason and I booked a studio tour at Paramount movies. These studios were just a 30 minute walk from where we were staying.

We really enjoyed this tour, it was more personal, only having 6 or 7 in the group, and the guide tailored the tour to what the participants wanted out of it. We would recommend this tour over the Warner Brothers studio tour.

Oscars at Paramount studios

Water tower

Sound studios at Paramount

Lucille Ball's dressing rooms

Entry

Paramount's historic movie theatre

This tour was 3 hours long bringing us to the time of checkout. We drove up to Mulholland Drive for a panoramic look over LA for the last time.

View from Mulholland Drive

The original intention was to drive to Santa Monica, but we just ran out of time, as we still wanted a last look at Universal Studios to make the most of those annual passes. Alex went on a couple of rides and we saw a couple of shows, however, it is now school holidays in California, so wait times were at least tripled and the extra crowds took the shine off it a bit.

By this time it was 6pm and time to return the hire car. Thank goodness we allowed plenty of time as it took almost an hour through the crawling traffic to get to our destination. Jason then had a dispute with the car hire people, which took another 45 minutes and I believe is still not resolved, but that's another story.

When we got to the check in, Jason asked if we could be seated with spare seats so that Sam could lie down (by this stage she was a little better, but we wanted more space!). They actually bumped us to an earlier flight so we could have bulkhead seats, though this meant we had to forgo the Qantas lounge and it's showers as it was boarding in 40 minutes of our arrival. THEN we had to go through the whole process of declaring those duelling pistols and that had them scratching their heads. And that's yet another story. 

We didn't fair too badly on the long 16 hour flight to Melbourne which arrived at 9am. Another discussion about those pistols and we did then in fact make it to the Qantas business lounge this time. Arrived to a mildly humid Brisbane day at 1pm where our housesitter picked us up in the Subaru "beast".

We are now unpacked, grocery shopping done, and wondering where those 5 weeks went!

Thanks for following our journey, hope you enjoyed the ride!