This morning we stayed in bed a bit longer since Danielle was used to the 3 hours time difference and I didn’t woke up from a railway. We wanted to look at some places we went already in 2012 but this time with a different goal or at a different spot. First up was the Hollywood sign, last time we only saw it from a mall at Hollywood Boulevard, this time we wanted to go as close as possible.

On the way to the spot we had no traffic at all and so I decided to take an exit early to drive over Hollywood Boulevard. But then I saw an empty parking spot which was free until 11:00am, that would give us about 1,5 hours to look at the attractions only 3 blocks away…

After taking the usual pictures and grabbing a frappuccino (did I already wrote that it was about 25 degrees?) for the walk back to our car we continued our tour to 3000 Canyon Lake Drive. There was enough parking space and we got some nice touristy pictures.

After taking the pictures it was time for lunch which we had at the Farmers’ Market and combined it with shopping for running socks at the Nike Store, a new cover for Danielle her iPhone and a SD-Card to Lightning converter for my iPad at the Apple Store.

Within 2 hours we were done and left to the Beverly Center. This is the Beverly Hills fashion shopping mall but we weren’t there for shopping at the mall, we went towards a store 157 North Robertson Boulevard.

Yes, it was the first time we went shopping for Tommy Hilfiger clothing from the European collection this year. But the selection was limited, most of the store were speciality items from the runway collections and since we both don’t have runway sizes… But we still found some nice new items for spring.

After we were done with shopping we went down to the Santa Monica Pier from some more beach time and another sunset. It was much more difficult to make good pictures here since it was really crowded at the beach. But we got some and that with a free parking spot only minutes walking from the pier made it a successful night.

We went back to the hotel because on Monday we wanted to be at the Disneyland Park as early as possible since we had hopper tickets for both Disneyland and Disney’s California Adventure. And we made it, we were among the first to enter the park and it wasn’t crowded at all. We start of with a Starbucks coffee in Mainstream after which we visited Star Tours, Buzz Lightyear, Jungle Cruise, Pirates, Haunted Mansion and made some pictures with characters before we headed to the other park.

In California’s Adventure we enjoyed the Aladdin Musical, the Genie in the show is awesome. Afterwards we visited some rides and took character pictures before we headed back to the Disneyland Park to see the Soundsational Parade.

The parade was fun to see, this is way better as the Christmas parade in Toronto and the weather is much better too.

While waiting for the parade I found out that Siemens had a joint-venture with the Avengers in the Innoventions building and off course we needed to meet some of my colleagues and take pictures with them.

Soon it was time to leave and after riding the Storybook Land Canal Boats and It’s a Small World (sponsored by Siemens) we had dinner at the Village Haus. And when we exited we both felt cold and a bit tired which made us decided to go back to the car and leave Disneyland behind.

The day after would be our last day in California. We had an overnight flight back to Toronto which made us decided to have a really lazy morning in the hotel. In the afternoon we went to Rodeo Drive and we drove through Beverly Hills to look at the huge houses.

Early in the evening we brought back our rental car. Since the rental facility is located of the airport in a hotel they advised us to come one hour early to make sure we make it to the airport on time. In the end that made us being back really early since we didn’t have traffic on the way to the airport, the shuttle arrived in 5 minutes, there was no waiting line in the terminal and our flight was almost an hour delayed…

Both really tired we arrived back in a snow-covered Toronto and at 6:4oam we were waiting at the baggage claim and only 40 minutes later we opened the door of our condo….