Our RV Adventures

First, a repeat announcement

Our daughter Brandi called from the doctor’s office about 8:30 this morning to tell us that our upcoming grandchild is a boy. And his name is Landon. And he’s due the first week of September.

So now we will have a matched set.  One of each.

Landon –

And our granddaughter Piper –

And only 17 years apart.  Landon is due on Piper’s 17th birthday.

Anyway, back to today.

Today was a twofer. We were going to attend the taping of two episodes of the Bonnie Hunt Show at 2pm and 6pm.

The 2pm show will be aired tomorrow, April 21st, and the 6pm show will air on Thursday, April 22nd.

We left the rig about 9 am, because we wanted to have plenty of time to have lunch before the taping, and also allow for any traffic delays.

We decided to eat at a place about a block from the studio called Kay & Dave’s Mexican Cantina. Jan had a two item combo plate and I had a lunch special, with chicken tortilla soup, salad with lime-cilantro dressing, and a chile relleno. The relleno wasn’t as good as Esther’s last week, but it all was good.

We had to check in before noon at gate 2 of The Culver Studios, where The Bonnie Hunt Show is taped.

The Culver Studios, under various names and owners, has been around since 1918. It has been called RKO, Desilu, and Hughes Studios, among others, and owned by such as Cecil B. Demille, Lucy and Desi Arnez, and Howard Hughes,

Movies such as Gone with the Wind, King Kong, Citizen Kane, A Star is Born, and E.T.  were filmed here. And TV shows like Batman, Lassie, The Andy Griffith Show, Hogan’s Heroes, The Untouchables, The Real McCoys, and more recently, The Nanny, Deal Or No Deal, Las Vegas, Mad About You, Scrubs, and, of course, The Bonnie Hunt Show were/are filmed here.

After standing in line a few minutes, we were given badges with our seating number on them, in our case, 80 and 81, After about 30 minutes we were lead to an outdoor seating area where we stayed until about 30 minutes before show time. At that time we were taken to our seats in the studio. But before that we had to go thru a security check, including metal detectors. This was to insure that we had no cell phones or cameras with us.

Which is why we have absolutely NO pictures of anything to do with the show.

And they fed us too. As we were walking in, they handing us a hot dog wrapped in foil and a can of root beer.

Then about 15 minutes, Bill, the warmup guy, came out and got things started by telling jokes, asking questions of the audience, and telling us how the show was going to work.

The show, like most talk shows, is taped in real time, In other words, It takes one hour to tape the show. When it’s time for a commercial, they keep the tape rolling in black, and everyone on stage takes a break for 60, 120, or however many seconds the commercial break lasts, and then the show picks back up.

During the break, people swarm out on the stage, ladies touching up hair and makeup of both Bonnie and her guests, sound guys checking mics, lighting people checking, well, lights, and other staff talking with Bonnie about things on the show.

Then, poof, about 5 seconds before the end of the break, everyone disappears, and Bonnie looks up at the camera and says “Welcome back”. It’s all very smooth.

The first show’s guest were Brian Austin Green and Yvette Nicole Brown. Toward the end of the show, Bonnie did her regular “Dessert of the Day” segment, which was a Boston Cream Cupcake, And we all got one. Staffers passed out boxes to each of us, but asked us not to eat them till later.

About 10 minutes after the show was over, they set up for a pickup. A pickup is a guest segment to be inserted into a later show. In this case it was Anthony Anderson from Law & Order.taped a segment with Bonnie that will be used in a show sometime next week.

After that, Bonnie came out in the audience and walked around, thanking people for coming. A really nice touch.

By then it was about 3:30 and we were told to be back for the second taping about 4:45 pm. We decided to go back to the same place we had lunch and just share an order of nachos and an order of apple-cranberry bread pudding, since we were still pretty full from lunch.

Back at the studio we were lead back in right on time. They also tried to give us another hot dog and root beef, but we turned them down.

Bill, the warmup guy, told us that one of the listed guest, Ed Begley, Jr., of Living with Ed, would not be there, but we were supposed to clap when his name was mentioned anyway. Bill said that Ed Begley’s would be taped later and inserted in the show, just like Anthony Anderson’s was done earlier.

The other guest were Patrick Warburton of “Rules of Engagement” and “Seinfeld”, and Robert Keenan, the director of the movie “Food, Inc.”

The other neat thing was we got some giveaways. We each got a T-shirt, a DVD and s book of the nature film by Disney called “Earth”, and a DVD of the movie “Food, Inc”.

Again, after the show was over, Bonnie came out and walked around the audience, talking to people and thanking them for coming. And this time Jan got to shake her hand.

It was about 7:45 pm by the time we were heading back to the truck, and it was about 9:15 by the time we got back home.

A long day, but a fun day.

And tomorrow, still more fun.

We going to take a tour of the movie stars homes. I think we’ll probably just see a lot of big, locked gates, but we’ll see.

More tomorrow…

This late breaking news just in…

We just found out our upcoming grandchild is a BOY!

His name is Landon.

– – – – – – – – – – – –

Today we visited the La Brea Tar Pits, which strangely enough, is in the middle of Beverly Hills. And even stranger, or maybe funnier, The La Brea Tar Pits, actually translates as The The Tar Tar Pits, since “La Brea” means “The Tar”’ in Spanish. Thus the title of this blog.

Anyway, we got there about 11 and decided to eat lunch first at a Marie Callenders right next door, or as they call it in Beverly Hills, just ‘”Callenders”. Apparently ‘Marie’” isn’t fancy enough.

And this is not your average Marie Callenders.

And the food was really upscale too. We both had the Trio lunch plate, which consisted of a gorgonzola-pear salad with walnuts and cranberries, a choice of soup, (Jan had potato cheese, I had chicken tortilla) and a warm turkey/cheese sandwich on focaccia bread. It was all really good. And we were so full we didn’t even have room for pie…then.

After lunch we walked next door to the Tar Pits. Before we even crossed the street we could smell the asphalt in the air. And walking into the park we could see the results of the asphalt, or al least, the simulated results.

The tar, along with methane gas, bubbles up from the ground and forms large pools. And it’s been doing this for tens of thousands of years. The oldest fossil found here has been dated to 38,000 years ago.

Then rainwater and dirt/grass/leaves accumulate on the surface, masking the tar. Animals com down to drink and get mired in the muck. And sometimes predators come to feast on the “stuckees” and get stuck themselves. Thus a wide range or predators and prey have been excavated from the tar here.

Here is an excavation that’s been under way for years, and tens of thousands of fossils have been found.

Here are the bones of a sabertooth cat that are in the process of being removed.

Many of these animals were much larger than their contemporaries. Here is a medium-sized sloth. And being medium-size, this sloth was only 7 feet high and weighed 1800 pounds!

And again,this ancient bison was much larger than the ones that live today.

This is an American camel, that become extinct over ten thousand years ago.

This is a mother Mastodon and her baby, found together in the tar.

And this is “Zed”, a 13 foot tall Columbian Mammoth, bigger than any elephant alive today

These are the bones of an American Lion, that was larger than any lion or tiger of today, and larger than the sabertooth cat from its own era.

This is the skeleton of a horse. What’s different about this is that horses died out in the Americas thousands of years ago, and didn’t return until brought over by the Spanish explorers in the 1500’s.

This short-faced bear was enormous. Larger than any bear today, it was a foot taller than any grizzly and probably weighed a thousand pounds more.

And this is the sabertooth cat. Sometimes incorrectly called a sabertooth tiger, it is actually closer to today’s housecats, rather than tigers.

This diorama shows a sabertooth trying to munch on a short-faced bear. I think the cat will probably end up as bear chow.

It was really amazing walking around here, thinking about all this going on right where we were standing 20 or 30 thousand years ago.

Leaving the Tar Pits we drove about a mile away to cruise the famous Rodeo Dr.

We saw a lot of expensive cars, and a lot of shops with names we couldn’t pronounce.

Guess I should have been more impressed, but I wasn’t.

Tomorrow we’ll be attending two tapings of the Bonnie Hunt Show that will be shown Wednesday and Thursday of this week.

More later…