Our last morning in LA, we woke up & bubble wrapped our bounty

& headed downtown to grab some lunch.

We wanted to try out some LA food trucks, but hadn’t managed to be anywhere near the pioneer of the industry, Kogi. Instead, we found a few good options parked between the towering downtown office buildings. So, we hit up Lobsta Truck. I had seen it featured in Serious Eats’ Lobster Roll Rumble, so I knew it was a great place to start, plus we’re never ones to turn down lobster.

We ordered one with mayo & one with butter.

Butter wins.

Butter always wins.

Just down the street a little, we ducked into Bottega Louie, an absolutely gorgeous restaurant, gourmet market & patisserie that’s all marble & white & full of natural light…where I could make myself perfectly comfortable sipping champagne, brunching & sampling my way through the rainbow of macarons.

Instead, we picked up a “thank you for watching our dog” gift, a few of the macarons & a Nutella beignet, because life is about compromise.

Having that “homeless,” no hotel room, no real place to go feeling, we headed to Sunset Beer Company for a few pints & some browsing…

& then up to the Hollywood Hills to the Griffith Observatory.

The observatory itself is perched right on the edge of a cliff, where you can see the Hollywood sign & whole city of Los Angeles from the terraced decks all around the building.  You may recognize it…it was in The Rocketeer.

Out in front & along the side of the building there are tons of  interactive astronomy exhibits, & there are even more inside, like those scales that tell you that you weigh less on other planets 🙂 We also caught the short film, narrated by Leonard Nimoy, on the history of the observatory & it’s renovation–it was a really great way to spend the afternoon.

Best of all? It’s FREE!

We had big plans for the rest of our evening, before we caught the red eye home–like tracking down the Kogi truck–but ended up getting front-ended (Seriously. I’m still not even sure how that really actually happened*.) & stuck in traffic for two hours** just to go 14 miles, so we ended this vacation with a sad LAX turkey club sandwich (We were in the terminal under construction. AGAIN.) & a ton of wine (because, flying.).

Happy #IGTRAVELThursday! Check out the other amazing travels from bloggers all over the world by clicking the logo below!

*A man attempted to put his car in park at a traffic light, but instead put it in reverse.  After 14 seconds of sustained horn-blaring from Tom, he hit us anyway.  After some expletives vacated Tom’s mouth, and he examined the bent license plate on the front of our rental car, he dismissed the old man with haste and said, “we’re never coming back here.”

**It was not even rush hour.