Our main flight to Thailand (16 hours) left out of Los Angeles.  Due to it being a ridiculously long flight, we decided to fly to Los Angeles a day early to give ourselves a break in flying.  We arrived in LA at 9am, took a taxi to our hotel, checked in, and spent the rest of the day exploring!

We stayed at the Hilton Garden Inn Marina del Ray and had a great experience! I highly recommend this hotel.  It is about a 10 minute drive from LAX and it is one of the stops for the hop-on-hop-off bus tour! This made it very convenient for us.

After we got settled in our room, we headed out to catch the bus.  We decided to do the bus tour in LA because of traffic and parking.  The (Green Line) bus picked us right in front of our hotel.  We drove through Venice, Marina del Ray, and Santa Monica.

We had to switch lines (red) which took us to all the attractions we wanted to see:

Beverly Hills

Rodeo Drive

Farmers Market and the Grove

Walk of Fame (specifically the Backstreet Boys Star)

We ate lunch at Pinks Hot Dogs. It was delish!

Chinese Theater.  There happened to a premiere the evening we were there so we got to see them setting up!

We got pretty close to the Red Carpet!

Mall at Dolby Theater

Hollywood Sign!  Tip- to get good views of this.  Go to the third floor of the Mall at Dolby Theater.

We concluded our evening by meeting my husband’s cousin, Rachel in Venice Beach for dinner.  After dinner we stopped to get ice cream at Salt and Straw.  If you’re ever in LA, I highly recommend Salt and Straw! It was the best ice cream we’ve ever had (and we eat a lot of ice cream)!

We had a great day in Los Angeles which was the beginning of our trip in Thailand and Singapore!