Rialto, Subways and Hollywood

Yesterday was aweome, exhausting and something that I'm pretty glad is only done once a year. I took thirteen teenage girls and one adult to Hollywood, CA!

My day began at 4:30 in the morning as I was extremely nervous and woke up at that time and could not fall back alseep. The reason I was nervous is that this was the first ever event I have put together and done by myself minus my amazing youth pastor husband Mike. As you can see this might make one a bit nervous taking thirteen girls to Hollywood (or Hollyweird), CA. We met at the metrolink station at 9am in the morning and our train pulled out at 9:36am. Our ride was pretty uneventful until we told some of the girls that they could get off the train to get a snack at one of the stops on our way to Union Station. Little did we know that the train only stopped for 30 seconds at all stops except our previous train station in San Bernardino. The train began moving and five of my girls were not on the train. Luckily the train stopped as they saw the girls running and they all jumped back on. I was glad we did not lose them in Rialto, although its only like 20 minutes from Riverside. The remainder of our two hour trip was uneventful. When we pulled into Union Station we hopped on the Los Angeles Subway and took the Red Line up to Hollywood and Highland. We went to Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum which was surprisingly not that exciting to High School girls (Junior High girls seem to love it). After this we wandered over to Hollywood and Highland. Some of us went into Sephora and ended up getting free makeovers, which was pretty sweet and I ended up buying $20 eyeshadow (Calypso) which is not normally something I would do, but this eyeshadow is the best. After the girls had their makeovers we walked over to Grauman's Chinese Theater were some girls took a picture with Marilyn Monroe, shirtless Elvis tried to get in our picture(creepy), a tall, caped, one-eyed dude scared Julie to death by growling at her, Spiderman hit on Brianna and there were pirtates everywhere. We then took the Subway to Universal City Walk, shopped around, and had an amazing dinner and Buca di Beppo. Some of the girls thought that our waiter was hot and were flirting with him until they found out he was 24 years old. I thought that was pretty funny! After dinner and a little more shopping we took the Subway back to Union Station. The subway was as crowded on a Saturday night as the Subway in New York is at rush hour. We had a uneventful ride back to Riverside and arrived on time. I think parents were relieved that their daughters came back alive and well from Los Angeles. I did not get to bed until 2am, but you can find out why if you read Mike's blog. Overall it was a wonderful day to get to know students and it made me look at ministry and say, "I'm really glad that I'm not a youth pastor, just a volunteer!" :-)