Universal Hollywood | Taryn's Mad Hatter Adventures

9/10/22

I was fortunate to be chosen to attend a training in California with some other travel agents from our agency. The mandatory parts were one day in Disneyland and one day in Disney’s California Adventure. My bestie Chrissy and I decided to extend our trip and visit Universal Hollywood and sightsee around the Los Angeles area. We flew in a few days early to do this.

We had an evening flight from Philadelphia that connected in Nashville. We ended up delayed and delayed and didn’t arrive to Los Angeles until about 11:30 p.m. local time (2 hours later than we were supposed to). We rented a car from Budget, and upon arrival, they didn’t have the car I already paid for, but instead offered me a mini van or pick up truck… That unfortunately was not going to work for me! So they offered us a huge SUV for $25 more per day.

Los Angeles was just coming off of a heat wave and had the first day of rain in weeks. We were lucky enough to drive in it on the 405! It took about 30-45 minutes to get from the airport to our hotel.

We were booked for two nights at the Best Western Plus Media Center Inn & Suites in Burbank. We made our way there, and checked in around 1:00 a.m.?? It was soooooo quiet. We had to park two levels below the hotel and take an elevator up to our room. We got to the room…the keys did not work. We lugged everything back to the lobby and he gave us two new keys. We got back up to the room…the keys did not work. I told Chrissy to stay there and I’ll go down. I’m waiting for the elevator and the door opens. THE MAN IS THERE! He scared the crap out of me. He told me he saw us on the cameras and that they keys didn’t work. So he came up to investigate. He couldn’t get it to work either, so he went down to get keys for a new room. We were so tired and just exhausted. He was very apologetic!

We were very happy with the location of the hotel. It was very close to Universal, Warner Brothers Studio, LA sights, and the major highways. They served a complimentary breakfast that included waffles, sausage, eggs, cereal, yogurt and a bunch more. It was good! The front desk staff was nice and I appreciated offstreet parking. I would stay here again. Need a hotel booked? I can also book that for you!

We weren’t really sure what order we were going to do things in because it was supposed to rain all day Saturday. We didn’t really want to do Universal or sight see in the rain. Once we woke up, we could see the rain was stopping and decided to make this our Universal day. We decided to drive and park there so that we could do something after if we wanted to (vs. taking an Uber). We got moving and got to the parking lot around 9:30 a.m. The park opened at 9:00 a.m. Parking was $30 for regular parking.

Once parked in the parking garage we headed toward the park. To get there, we had to walk through City Walk. This City Walk was much different than the one in Orlando! Some of the shops and restaurants were the same, but the layout was not the same. It seemed smaller and more closed in. Shops were one after the other, connected along a walkway.

This is where we entered:

You can see here how narrow the path was.

They also had a Voo Doo Doughnut shop. It was empty! No line at all. Much different from the Orlando one where the line often queues up outside the shop.