CALIFORNIA VACATION|LOS ANGELES|HOLLYWOOD|LONG BEACH|ENSENADA

"I've been to HOLLYWOOD!"

You guys know how much I love to travel, so as a graduation gift to myself (but really just another excuse to travel), I went on a 4 days & 3 nights cruise to Ensenada, Mexico with my boyfriend. Being the smart travelers that we are (or being a recent college grad traveling on a budget) we took public transportation as much as we could on this trip. We pretty much took it all; taxis, buses, metro, boats, planes, shuttle vans, and of course walked (a lot).

We took the Megabus to Chicago from Madison to catch our flight (fly from a bigger airport-flights will be MUCH cheaper). Luckily, I booked our tickets back in early March so we got the $1 Megabus deals. YAHHH GREAT WAY TO SAVE SOME $$$. But that also meant we arrived in Chicago at 1AM. Luckily, it worked out perfectly because we had an early flight out of Chicago at 5:45 AM. We finally arrived in Long Beach, California around 10 AM the next morning and left our luggage at the hotel and started exploring.

Our first stop was downtown L.A. From downtown Long Beach, we took the blue line metro (one way ticket cost $2.75) to downtown Los Angeles. It took about 1 & ½ hrs to get there. We took a couple hours to explore downtown L.A. then headed to Hollywood. Again we took the metro for about another 30 min. Hollywood was FANTASTIC! We walked around for a long time—on the walk of fame—trying to look for Ellen DeGeneres’s star, sadly we didn’t find it. But I found many others among them were Britney Spears, Marilyn Monroe, KISS, J.Lo and many others. One of the thing I got the most excited about was passing Jimmy Kimmel’s studio! OMG….I literally didn’t move for a solid 5-10 minutes because I wanted to take the moment in. Among other exciting things we saw was the infamous Hollywood sign. We were to far too get a decent photo with it, but it was so surreal to see it in person. Now I can finally say, I’VE BEEN TO HOLLYWOOD!

After that, we returned to Long Beach and knocked out. We were both super tired after the long night & day. The next day we spent it walking along the beach and just exploring Long Beach before we departed for our cruise.

The rest of our time on this vacation was spent on the cruise to Ensenada, Mexico. This was my second time on a Carnival cruise, so everything was pretty much the same right down to the design of the cruise ship. Overall, the cruise was fun, relaxing, and a bit chilly, but nonetheless we enjoyed it every much. Although, I’ll say I think I’ve had enough with cruises for a while. I can’t wait to visit California again and do some more exploring!

Thanks, for reading guys.

XOXO,
Sia