That’s All Folks!

Finally, the last installment of the Great Road/California Trip 2013. I feel like I’ve been yammering about it for months (I have).

As part of our Hollywood tour with Anaheim Visitors Center, we went on the Warner Brothers VIP tour. You would think this is their fanciest tour, but you would be wrong. This is the basic tour, but it really provided enough time at the studio, and we got to see plenty.

With many things, the guide can make or break this tour. Our guide was more of a breaker than a maker. I volunteered to sit up front with him, so I at least got to ask him a few questions and sort of steer him towards things I was interested in. If I thought he mentioned something I wanted to know about, I kept asking him to repeat himself until I could understand him. For the rest of the group…who knows? He was difficult to understand and seemed to know only about “Pretty Little Liars” and movies made post-2010.

The 411 on the Anaheim Visitor Center

During our stay in California in July 2013, we took two tours offered by The Anaheim Visitor Center, AKA Anaheim 411 (that’s their Web address). I tried to find information about them on TripAdvisor before we booked anything, but it was difficult to pin down. Some people seem to have had bad experiences with them (it seems usually when they booked through a third party), others raved about the personal attention and smaller tour sizes.  We decided to take our chances and book with them as they were the only tour operator we could find that went where we wanted to go. Our experience fell on the high end of the spectrum, for the most part. They are a legitimate company (or were as of July 2013), they showed up, they did what they said they were gonna do, and it was fun!

The first tour we took was the Warner Brothers Studio and Hollywood combo. I’ll talk about Warner Brothers in a separate post as Anaheim Visitor Center has nothing to do with that tour—they just drop you off and pick you up there. And arrange the tickets. Plus you get a small discount in the gift shop.

Tour Guide Tom (who is also an owner of the company) picked us up promptly and gave us some Hollywood history lessons on the way to our first destination: Beverly Hills. Looking at my photos, I see snaps of a bunch of gates and driveways and some homes, but I cannot recall now who lived where. But at the time, we were all, “Yeah! Cool!” I think I can safely say that this one is Tim Burton’s house (or so Tom said):

Want!