Christmas Time & Hobbity Traffic Woes

Today was all about relaxing.. at least the first half of it. I've been on the go the past few days so I spent the majority of the day getting out Christmas decorations and setting up my tree. What made this extra fun was that I wasn't doing it alone. Both Lisa and Lydia (who hasn't decorated a tree in years) got to help me. It look us about an hour but by the end the tree looks beautiful. I still plan on putting up lights around the living room but my place already looks very Christmasy.

Later in the day my buddy Josh was coming over as we were going to see a special sneak preview of the third and final Hobbit movie The Battle of the Five Armies. I'm super excited for this!!!!

It's Josh's birthday today so I had planned to take him to dinner before the movie and then enjoy the movie. Well nothing went as planned. He was suppose to arrive at my place no later then 4, he showed up around 4:45. It was also pouring outside so he had to change clothes (he rides a motorcycle) so we didn't leave my place until about 5:15. The movie started at 7 and we had to get there by 6 to get decent seats and guarantee that we get in (as the overbook these screenings). In good weather it takes about 45 minutes to get to the theater from my place but it's pouring outside so I figured we'd be cutting it close and there was no way we'd be able to do dinner beforehand... btw I was starving.

We head out and as I expected traffic was horrible. We get to our freeway exit and it's closed, we get to the next exit and it's closed. I start to worry that something is going on in Hollywood. We get to the third exit (going further and further way from the theater) and it's open. It takes forever to get off as everyone else is trying to get off the freeway. As we turn right to backtrack a few miles I noticed that Hollywood Blvd is closed off and they are making traffic go left and right on Franklin. I flip a u turn and head down three more lights before I see Hollywood open so I could cross it. I make it to Sunset and figured we're good, the theater is on Sunset and though there is traffic, it's moving.

Well we go a few blocks and find out that Sunset is closed as well. This is were panic sets in. We have a 20 minutes to get to the theater by 6 and traffic is being detoured left and right. Josh manages to download Wazes on his phone and he maps out an alternate route to get around the traffic. This route takes us even further away from the where we need to go and I'm just hoping we get there before the room is full and there are still two seats for us and I don't care if they are together or not. I figured there was no way we'd get there by 6. Wazes had us going down alleys and back streets but surprisingly we managed to get to the theater just after 6 and the even better part is that they weren't making us wait outside in the rain and we were able to go right into the theater.

After a crazy hour of traffic and rain we still managed to get to the theater on time and get some pretty good seats. As for the movie.. if you know me, you know I loved it. But I'll give a more detailed/spoilery review in my next post. Oh by the way.. the Hollywood Christmas Parade was the reason for all the road closures. And we did go to Denny's for some much needed dinner after the screening.