Starting towards San Francisco- Sunday, July 9, 2006

 On Sunday morning, July 9th, we got up quite early and had a full day planned. 

We began by continuing on the tour of TV and movie sites that we had started on Friday. We had gotten as far as Santa Monica and decided to call it quits that day. We continued on the original route that I had planned and worked our way back towards Santa Monica.

We started at Alamitos Bay, where the opening to "Gilligan's Island" was filmed. It was only about 20 minutes or so from our hotel. Unfortuately, when I went to take a picture, we noticed that the memory card had not been put back into our camera that morning when we had stopped at a Wahlgren's to get our pitures saved on a CD. We had to go all the way back to get our card back, and got lost when we did so. As a result, we were about an hour off from where we had expected to be. (By the way, since we were driving through Seal Beach, I assume that we were only a short ways from my cousin Cathy's. Maybe we'll have a chance to see her on one of the next legs of our trip.)

We drove through Long Beach and found the home of Joan on "Joan of Arcadia." Julie and I both thought that the houses in Long Beach were great-- a real eclectic assortment of beautiful little homes. From there, we saw the fire station that served as Station 51 on "Emergency!" and the hospital where they took the injured people. Both were very much the same as they were on T.V.

The real highlight of the tour on this day was Torrance High School. The school served as the high school for both "Beverly Hills 90210" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and the figures prominently in the stories of both. The school itself is very cool and it was amazing to get out and walk around the outside of it. I remember commenting once when 90210 was on, and I said, "Come on, what high school really looks like that!" Well, this one is the real thing. Unfortunately, we really couldn't see into the courtyard area where the beautiful fountain is, but we sat on the steps of the school for a while. We did see some other tourist with a camera who evidently had jumped the fence to get in. We weren't going to do that. We did walk a few blocks to the house used as Buffy's house.

Julie thought it was interesting that the "Beverly Hills, 90210" house wasn't in Beverly Hills, but was in Arcadia. The "Joan of Arcadia" house wasn't in Arcadia, but was in Long Beach.

From there we went to the beach house that was used in the later seasons of "Beverly Hills, 90210" (again, not in Beverly Hills). We saw the school from "Joan of Arcadia" in El Segundo. Then we saw one of the schools used in Grease in Venice. That brought us back to near Santa Monica, and we were ready to head north, after a lunch at Taco Bell.

We followed route 1 up along the coast to Malibu and stopped at Paradise Cove. We spent awhile on the beach there, right near where Jim Rockford had his trailer on "The Rockford Files." Anna enjoyed jumping into the surf again. We saw a few surfers out on the waves. The place was crowded and we paid more for parking there than we probably should have, but we got to enjoy the sun for a while.

We continued our way up the coast hoping to get closer to San Francisco, but we had a long way to go. We followed route 1 for a ways right along the beaches and cliffs of the coast. Eventually we took route 101, which went a little faster. By the time we decided to stop, we had only gotten as far as Pismo Beach, but it was time for us to turn in for the night.