Day 1 - Mar 22, 2005 Last updated: 4/10/05 8:00pm PT
Always on the lookout for interesting travel destinations, I had seen a program on TV about the latest and greatest roller coasters. There is a coaster at Six Flags Magic Mountain, near LA, called “X” that looked really unique and worth the trip (I’ll describe it later). So a trip idea was born. We’d never been to LA, so we thought we’d also do the Hollywood tourist thing. We pretty much stayed in the Hollywood area for the entire trip, with the exception of Magic Mountain.
Boy, I thought Chicago traffic was bad! It was pretty thick driving from the airport to the hotel, but nothing like after lunch (Fish tacos at Wahoo’s are awesome).
Our first day we went to a TV show taping for the CBS show “Still Standing”. TV tapings are free and I had reserved tickets for two shows in advance. (The second show was on day 3, but we never went to that one.)
After lunch we checked in to the hotel and, after a short rest, headed to the TV show taping. It took 1 hour to go 14 miles. At 2:30 in the afternoon. With no accidents on the highway.
The reason we didn’t go to the second TV show taping was because one is enough. It is interesting to see how it’s done, and I’m glad we went, but there really can’t be much difference between the shows, other than actors and jokes (and sometimes even the jokes are the same). There is a lot of down time for the actors. Every scene is shot at least twice. They have some unknown comedian in the audience who tries to keep you entertained during the down time. I was more interested in seeing the behind the scenes stuff, so I didn’t pay much attention to him. He would bring people up to the front row of the stands to make them look like fools. He would also throw candy at us like we were seals in a zoo. It took about 3 hours to complete the 30 minute sit-com. There was more traffic going back to the hotel, but not as bad
No cameras allowed in the taping, so no pictures today.