Frank Across America - Frank Goes to Hollywood

As most of you probably noticed from the lack of updates in the beginning of the month, I was on a lengthy vacation following our beloved and struggling Fighting Irish around. In a 10 day span I went from Philly to LA to Vegas to San Diego to Chicago to South Bend taking in the UCLA and Boston College games. Since this is a bye week, I figured now would be the perfect time to post about my trip in a mutli-post series I have titled “Frank Across America” (props to one of my roommates for the title). Part one of this epic tale will be all that happened from the time I left my precious Philadelphia up until the end of the UCLA game at which point I left LA for Vegas. So without further ado, I present to you part 1 of Frank Across America - Frank Goes to Hollywood.

Wednesday, October 3

After a rather hellish three days at work in which I did more than I normally do in a week, I left the office at roughly 7:30 to make it home in time to make my podcasting debut with the guys over at BruinShow.com to discuss the upcoming Notre Dame UCLA game. At this point I had not even begun to pack for my 10 day trip and my flight was scheduled to take off in roughly 14 hours. The Bruin Show podcast was a lot of fun and if you haven’t listened, it’s pretty funny to go back now and listen after the way the game unfolded.

Anyway, after the show, I decided it was time for dinner so before packing I headed to the closests Wawa (For those of you not in Delaware Valley, WaWa is like 7-11. Only you can get a hoagie made 24 hours a day). So it’s now about 11;30 and I start packing. Apparently it takes a while to pack for a 10 day trip. Who knew? After packing all my clothes and charging my laptop, cell phone, and digital cameras, I settled down for a little sleep around 5:00 AM.

All of 1 hour later, I woke up and showered and gathered my things and I was off.

Thursday, October 4

I got to the airport about 15-20 minutes before my buddy Mikey who was coming out for the LA and Vegas portion of this trip so I checked my bag, went through security, and found the gate. As Mikey walked up and put his stuff down he asked if I was selected for screening at security. I was not. Mikey was. TSA told him he was selected for screening because everyone with a one way ticket (he was flying home from Vegas, not LA) is selected for screening. Funny as I was not. Mikey is Asian, I am not. Nothing like a little profiling to start to the trip.

After a delay in Philly (shocker) and a 20 minute layover in Atlanta, we were on our way to the city of Angels. Fortunately the in flight movie was some stupid Harry Potter flick so I had no inclination to stay awake and watch it. I napped a bit and tried watching “Knocked Up” on my laptop before realizing that the little kids sitting around me probably shouldn’t see some of the scenes in that film.

Almost 9 hours after my first flight was scheduled for departure, we were on the ground at LAX. Upon arrival I found out the my Phills were just 3 outs away from being down 0-2 to the Rockies. Damn you Trevor Hoffman. Damn you San Diego Padres. One game. One freaking games you guys had to win out of your last two and we all could have avoided this damned “Rocktober,” but I digress.

After dropping our stuff off at our friend Glen’s, who was kind enough to let us crash at his place, our first destination was Pink’s Hot Dog Stand. For those of you unfamiliar with Pink’s, take a look at their menu - its a trip. If there is anything on it under 1,000 calories, I’d be surprised. Anyway, take a look at that Poli-Bacon-Chili Dog to your right. That little slice of heaven is a polish sausage with bacon, chili, and cheese all wrapped up n a tortilla. That’s right. A sausage with bacon AND chili AND cheese.

After pausing while my heart stopped for the first time on this trip, we hopped in the car and walked around Hollywood. Hollywood was pretty cool to see for the first time and after a couple of minutes we stumbled upon the line for the Jimmy Kimmel show and figured, what the hell. So we get in line and find out that “Soulja Boy” was the musical guests. For those of you unfamiliar with this group, as I was, they apparently have some song cleverly titled “Crank Dat” which has some dance associated with it that is all the rage. I really couldn’t tell you how it goes, but here’s a look at the Texas Longhorns performing it on the sidelines during their recent bout with UCF.

After about 15 minutes we decided it wasn’t worth the wait and just walked around Hollywood for a while. We took in the sights and then headed back to Glen’s to get ready to go out. Beings as I was running on an hour of sleep and a just a little nap on top of having the time zone change, I got the bright idea to pick up some Red Bull and Vodka to pregame with. Turns out that stuff will wake you right up. By 10:00 I was all kinds of hyper and ready for a night out in Santa Monica.

We met up with Jeff (Jack Daniels) at some bar whose name escapes me, but the line was too long so we went to a little Irish Pub whose name also escapes me. After a few rounds of Gin and Tonics and an Irish Car Bomb, I had enough drinks in me to start talking about Notre Dame and bowl games in the same sentence.

The highlight of Wednesday, however, would come on the ride home. Now my friend Mikey is a big guy like me and accompanying us to the bar were two of Glen’s neighbors who combined probably weigh about as much as my left leg. On the ride home Mikey passed out about the same time he buckled his seat belt. The first time I looked back his head was just kind of dangling. The second time I looked back, Mikey was completely passed on one of Glen’s tiny neighbors and of course I didn’t have my camera. Trust me, the sight of Mikey passed out on this girl was priceless. She was a trooper though and didn’t wake him up till we got back to the house.

I finally crashed at about 3:00 PST roughly 24 hours after embarking on this little journey.

Friday, October 5

After running on an hour of sleep and staying awake for roughly 24 hours you would think I would have crashed all morning. Instead, I was up by 8:30 and felt fully charged with no signs of a hangover whatsoever. Mikey on the other hand, couldn’t say the same. The three of us hit the road and did some more touristy stuff and hit up Venice Beach. Venice was crazy windy though and there was hardly anyone there so we left and headed off to check out the UCLA campus. We did manage to see Muscle Beach and the courts and hotel that were used for scenes in White Men Can’t Jump so that was pretty cool.

The UCLA campus was very nice and had some amazing scenery. UCLA is a very, very talented campus so needless to say we walked around for a little while. You could definitely tell that UCLA is a basketball school first though because there was hardly any buzz on campus for a football game and even in the bookstore, there wasn’t much emphasis on football. It was a stark contrast to trying to go to the Notre Dame bookstore on Friday afternoon on a game weekend. The picture also shows that UCLA was still trying to sell student tickets for the game the day before.

Anyway, Glen went to UCLA so he knew his way around pretty well so he took us by Pauley Pavilion and all of the other sites around campus.

From there we went back home to pick up some stuff and then head ed out for some more healthy eating.

Our dinning destination on this fine was a wonderful little establishment called Roscoe’s House of Chicken n Waffles. Now I have had the Pennsylvania Dutch version of Chicken and Waffles plenty of times, and while Roscoe’s style was a bit different it was just as tasty. I honestly don’t remember what the name of the meal I got was called, but I would imagine you could find out if you Googled “meals that will kill you in less than 30 days.” I’m also not going to lie - I didn’t indeed feel a little sick afterwards, but I think that might have just been the shame of eating two giant waffles and a plate of chicken smoothered in gravy. None the less, I was told you have to eat at Roscoe’s if you are in LA so I did and I can’t complain.

After a little more walking around in Hollywood, we headed over to the Sherman Oaks Notre Dame-Servite game to see Dayne Crist and Anthony McDonald. I already posted some of the pics of Crist the other day and will get around to posting the ones of McDonald sooner or later. It was definitely neat seeing a high school come out in the Blue-Gold, playing the fight song and doing most of the ND cheers. Unfortunately we could only stay for the first half because we had some boozing to do in Huntington Beach which was apparently not anywhere near where we were.

A shower and a couple more Red Bull and Vodka’s later, I was ready for a night out. We were supposed to meet up with Jeff again, but someone fell asleep at like 10:30 and didn’t hear their phone ring like 6 times. I’m not going to mention any names, but it was Jeff. Huntington was pretty cool but I felt like I was on an episode of Animal Planet with all of the cougars that were crawling around all over the place.

We chilled at this place called Crabby’s for a while where we saw one girl unable to walk out on her own on top of a couple of cougars in the late 30’s getting carded before ending the night as some place that was called a Gentlemen’s Club. Whatever that means. Anyway, good times were had by all.

Another late night in LA, but with gameday was only a few short hours away so there was no rest for the weary. At this point I realized I should give up on getting any sort of good night’s rest on this trip.

Saturday, October 6 - Gameday

We had to pick up our rental for the drive out to Vegas (which was coming up immediately following the ND-UCLA game) so we were up bright and early around 8:00 which is much earlier than I even get up for work on a daily basis, but certain sacrifices had to be made. Our rental, pictured to the left turned out to be a pretty decent car for what we needed. Had plenty of room and was mildly comfortable. After returning to Glen’s house to load up our bag and headed to the store to pick up some beers for our tailgate with Jimmy from Domewire.com (Jimmy loves when I include links to his site in these posts).

Case of Miller Lite for easy drinking. Check. Case of Sierra Nevada for the first couple of rounds. Check. Couple of Sparks for a that added bit of energy. Check. Ok we were ready to do some tailgating.

Meanwhile, Jeff apparently woke up sometime around 5AM and decided to just drive up to the Rose Bowl so he would be there by 8:00 so our first stop was to meet up with Jeff who was at the NDNation tailgate which happened to be at the complete opposite end of the stadium from where we were meeting Jimmy. I met JVan from the Nation there and I must say he was very nice and very hospitable. I talked some ND football with him and few other people while I was there and every there was very nice. We hung there for a while until we got the call from Jimmy that the grill and satelite were set up.

Once we got to the tailgate we ended up meeting up with Chrisb and Hank the Tank from the board as well as Kyle. As you can tell by the smile on my face and the spillage on my jersey, I had a pretty good time at the tailgate. The most common themes discussed were the offensive line, why the offensive line was so bad, how the offensive line could be fixed, and whose fault was it that the offensive line wasn’t performing. In between everyone was basically just taking bets as to how many holding penalties we’d get on punt returns.

The game itself was awesome. UCLA fans were insanely friendly and Jeff and I stopped to talk to a number of fans on our way in and did not encounter a single jerk in the entire bunch. Most were asking what happened to us that we were this bad and most just told us how much they hated USC which is perfectly understandable.

Speaking of the mutual hatred of USC, check out the youtube clip below that I uploaded tonight of the reaction in our section to the USC-Stanford score being announced. In a tie game, everyone in the stadium joined together to cheer when the final score was announced.

I took a bunch of pictures of the game itself, but instead of filling up this post with more pics, I uploaded them all to the UHND Flickr account where I also put all of the Blue Gold Game pictures from the Spring. Funny store about the pics… One of the drunk guys wearing a kilt said, “whoa Al Qaeda, you have a warrent for that thing?” when I was taking pics with the zoom lens at the end. \

Walking out of the stadium felt great even though the offense sputtered and we scored just 20 despite forcing 7 turnovers on defense. The best part of the walk out, though, was listening to the one event staff member telling the other workers that there would be some stabbings “fo real” if this was a USC game at the Coliseum.

Unfortunately for me the euphoria would not last too long as my beloved Phillies would lose game 3 of the NL Divisional Series to the Rockies and get eliminated just one hour after the Irish ended the losing streak. Oh well, as a Philadelphia sports fan, saying “there’s always next year” comes as natural to us as saying “Whiz wit out.”

The next installment of Frank Across America will be coming Thursday night as I detail my travels in Vegas, San Diego and Chicago which led up to a fun filled weekend in South Bend.

By the way, if anyone in LA needs a new car but has no credit or even bad credit…. I found a place for you. From the outside it looks awesome.