First time West coast LA and San Diego (Part 1)

[buzz_leedsyear]

I've never wrote a trip report before but seen as this was a new experience for my family and we received so many tips, as usual, from the dibb I wanted to share our experience with the the many dibbers on here who look for advice etc - If I can help just one person I'll have done my job!

Firstly we should have flown out to LAX on the 7th August, those of you who can remember seeing the nightmare scenes at Heathrow when the BA system went down, well we were in the middle of it!
We've always flown direct to America, whether Orlando or New York, so now DD was 12 and DS was 9 we thought they were old enough to try indirect - So a 3 hour delay at Manchester meant we missed our connection to LAX, to cut a long story short we were put in the Crown Plaza at terminal 4 and a indirect flight to LAX via San Francisco the next afternoon. The next direct flight would have meant us losing 2 days of our holiday so we decided to go for it!

So arriving over 30 hours late at LAX we picked up our car and drove to our first Hotel, the Universal Hilton at City Walk - a super super super location and great hotel. I loved the fact we could walk for a beer, and I really needed one! The first thing we noticed was that it was quite cold! It was only about 21 degrees and lacked the humidity of a Floridian august. We ate at 'in and out burger' at the other side of the freeway and the kids loved it! (I loved the price!)
As we had lost a night in Hollywood we had to cram as much as we could into three days so set our alarms for to ensure we could get early access Universal studios park on our first morning.

We arrived for park opening and manged to get on both the Harry Potter rides with virtually no queue, HPTFJ was a lot smoother than it's Florida counterpart and didn't make the DW and I feel as nauseous! What I didn't like about this early morning rush was that we didn't have the time to just stop and look. The Hollywood hills really do give a fantastic, beautiful back drop to the studios, something Orlando just can not compete with.
After that we made our way down the escalators (yes it really is that hilly!) to join the opening line for the recently opened Jurassic world. The views from the Escalator are brilliant and from here you can we the Warner Brothers and Disney studios in Burbank.
The new Jurassic world ride was great and we literally walked the line straight onto the ride. While we were down in the lower lot we rode The Mummy and Transformers which to be honest I preferred the Florida version - even with Brendan Fraser!

We returned to the top lot of the park and had virtually done every ride and the Waterworld show (very good actually) by Lunch when we had to go for our traditional Universal (Over priced) Krusty burger. The kids do love to sit in Moe's and I won't say no to a Duff either!

By this time the lines were now well over an hour for everything, so decided to take the tour... it was brilliant. They were filming the voice whilst we were were there but unfortunately no celebrities but do watch out for Norman Bates! As the lines we no even longer we took the short walk back to our hotel for a swim and a sleep! We only had the minion ride to do and the special effect show and that could wait until the evening.

[Minniebella]

Wow, shame about losing a day.looking forward to hearing more, we are heading out next August with ds9 and dd8 so I will be following along with your report.