Flying to Orlando (10.02.)
Got up at 5, had the first normal breakfast (for me that is baguette with nutella and a cup of milk). Tobi gave us a ride to the airport with his awesome Pontiac Firebird. We didn't have to wait long at all, the flight was really short and nice. We took 2 commissions before we departed and sketched them on the plane.
At the Orlando airport Chris picked us up, we didn't do much in the evening though since we were super tired.
Not the best day (9.02.)
We had a quick breakfast and left Chris' place around 1pm, our initial plan was to go to pick up some fur and then to Cartoon Colour Company. After the fur shop however some belt in the car slipped off due to extreme rain and everything stopped working. Luckily I managed to get the car off the freeway and park it next to the LA convention center. Luckily Steve came to help, which took about 1.5 hours due to rush hour. Tobi also arrived and AAA towed away the piece of junk.
Steve, Tobi and me. Crysler being towed away in the back. The yellow car is Tobis new Pontiac Firebird.
Since it rained heavily before, we got to see a Rainbow and a nice sunset. Here are photos Henrieke took while we were waiting:
Rainbow over downtown LA.
A true california sunset.
Since it was too late to do anything, we went to Trader Joe's in order to pick up some supplies for pancakes.
This is what Trader Joe's looks like inside. Lots and lots of signs, each drawn by the stores own artist. Awesome!
Our pancakes were fabulous! We also invited Rob Klein and had a nice evening with lots of chat about cartoons.
After they left, we spent the rest of the evening packing until about 3am.
San Diego Zoo (8.02.)
The San Diego Zoo was our destination for today. We arrived there at about 11.
Henrieke was obviously excited, here are a few photos from our day:
I'll start with the cutest. Yellow-footed rock wallabys!
Hyacinth macaw
Rare birds. Cablecar is in the background.
American river otter. Do I have to mention that he was cute?
Obvious.
View from the cablecar. The airport was pretty near.
Henrieke was freaking out over these. (Pronghorns)
After the Zoo we went to a Whole Foods market, which was super awesome, finally a store that sells healthy food! After that we went to Trader Joe's which was even more awesome, since they hire an Artist to draw signs for each store.
we made some pancakes in the evening for ourselves and Chris' housemates in the evening.
San Juan Capistrano (7.02.)
Since my mother told me San Juan Capistrano was a really nice place, we went there around noon.
The weather was nice, so I removed the convertible roof from the car. Also notice the carpool lane, one of the best american inventions. It's a lane on the far left of the road where only cars with 2 or more people in it are allowed to drive.
Chris also joined and we walked around a bit in the Town. The streets were almost empty since it was Superbowl sunday. The spanish mission there offered some nice photo opportunities.
A view of the main street of San Juan
As the sun set, Chris showed us a nice part of the coast, where we took these photos:
For dinner we went to a Pho (vietnamese rice noodle soup) place. I never tried it before but it was pretty good!
Annie Awards! (6.02.)
Both Henrieke and me ran out of clean clothes, so during the morning we were busy doing laundry. After some cheap hot dogs for lunch Chris and Margo invited us to a japanese market. It was like a little mall, full of japanese stores, I enjoyed it alot!
Japanese market
This, by the way, is the car we've been driving around with so far. It's Tobi's old car which is kind of falling apart but working fine.
Later we met up with Jason at a FedEx Office store, where I printed some of my sketches from my phone since he was a bit late. We arrived at Royce Hall just in time for the Annie Award ceremony. The host this evening was William Shatner, who was actually witty!
The show was really awesome thanks to many people, especially the guy doing the voice of Spongebob. I will upload some videos later. By the way, Eric Goldberg received his well-earned award for character development in Princess and the frog.
After the ceremony, we went to the VIP afterparty, first got some catering-food since we were super-hungy. We felt kind of out-of-place but in fact everyone was really friendly and we got to talk to alot of artists. Meeting Eric Goldberg was of course very important, and so eventually we walked up to him, being super-nervous. He was really friendly, we talked a bit about 2D animation and showed him out drawings. This pretty much made our day!
After everything closed down around midnight, we went to Denny's where we had some drinks/bacon and sketched a bit. Then we brought Jason home who we couldn't thank enough for enabling us to go to this amazing event! Also thanks to everyone else who made this possible!
LAX and Wal-Mart (5.02.)
We had quite a few not-fun things to do this day, the first being changing out flight. Originally we would fly SAN-LAX-MCO, but we wanted to depart from LAX. After being stuck in traffic jam for about an hour, spending some time to find the right desk and waiting another 10 minutes we had the luck of having a very friendly women and changing the flight was no problem at all.
Since we had nothing better to do and needed some groceries anyway, we went to Wal-Mart. There really was nothing exciting today to write about, so I'll save my letters for more exciting posts.
Fabric District and Santa Monica Beach (4.02.)
We didn't have any plans at all, so we decided to see the famous fabric district. Dani wanted to join too, so we picked her up from Burbank and went to downtown LA. The fabric district was sure impressive, endless piles of fabric and some were even useful to us.
We only had a quick lunch at Subway since in total we only had 3 hours at all. We all got some costume supplies and had to get our car at 5:30, since all the stores and also the parking lot closed at that time.
It was like this times 100.
Downtown LA from a rooftop parking lot.
Nothing special here, I just like the composition.
Only the finest fabrics in the fabric district.
Delicioso!
Unsure what to do, we went to the beach and took some long-exposure shots and enjoyed the fresh breeze.
Since Rob Klein wanted to meet up for dinner, we picked him up at his place and went to a mexican place, which turned out to be closed. The place we went to instead was pretty nice too! Dani and Henrieke sketched a bit and we chatted about cartoons. Also cornbread is cake, not bread.
Afterwards Rob invited us to his place, where we got to see lots of amazing storyboards for released and unreleased Disney comics.
Dani, Henrieke and Rob in their element.
Since it got pretty late already, we had to bring Dani back to Burbank. When we arrived at her place, I noticed alot of smoke coming out of the car, which kinda made me panick, but then again she lives on a hill and we drove up slowly, which made the motor run too hot and the cooling liquid boil. And since that wasn't enough to make me nervous, we got held up by the sheriff, who told us the registration for this car was expired. After handing her our IDs and the obviously not-expired registration, we had to wait and were asked some questions, and everything was fine. They were really nice too so that wasn't a big issue at all.
We finally arrived at Tobis place at about 1:00.
ASIFA (3.02.)
At 11:30 Steve picked us up and we went to the Cartoon Colour Company and picked up Cels and Cel ink. The store exists since 1947 and offers a wide variety of traditional animation supplies.
On our way to the ASIFA headquarters we made a stop at Coral Cafe (a place where apparently alot of animators eat) to have some very good lunch. In fact that was the first time we ate in a resaurant that wasn't a chain.
At the ASIFA we got to meet Stephen Worth who introduced us to everything there. We browsed through the archive and watched cartoons, later more people including Antran Manoogian (the president of ASIFA Hollywood) joined for a meeting.
Me, Henrieke, Steve and ASIFA board members.
Later we went to Rob Kleins place and looked through his giant collection of comics and model sheets. We got to talk alot about disney comics and cartoons in general, had dinner at Subway and got home past midnight. Also we got some fresh oranges from Robs own orange tree! 
Not much (2.02.)
We needed a day to rest, so we ended up doing pretty much nothing except meeting up with Jason in the Beverly Center for dinner and getting some food from CVS.
More Vegas (1.02.)
We left our room in the Planet Hollywood and checked out at 11, then drove to the "New York, New York" and walked around there. The exterior aswell as the interior of this hotel were pretty nice, they even had a rollercoaster which was sadly too expensive for us. We found an arcade and I ended up placing ITG and a round of House of the dead 4 with Chris while Henrieke and Sandro tried their luck on the biggest slot-machine we ever saw.
Next stop was the Luxor, a huge pyramid. Sadly they removed the interior theming, no more egyptian waitresses. They had the "Bodies" exhibition and one about the Titanic. Sadly they were quite overpriced. Across the street was the MGM Grand, where we got to see some lions and people trying to sell us time-share apartments.
The Golden Nugget Hotel in downtown was our last stop in LA, and the most familar looking part. They put this huge LED screen over the entire street, which probably looks really nice at night but sadly ruins the view at daytime.
There's a waterslide going through this.
The famous cowboy in the old city part.
In the Golden Nugget Hotel we got to see the biggest gold nugget in the world, then we wandered around the casinos there and had some deep fried oreos and a shrimp cocktail.
After looking through some gift stores but failing to find anything good, it was time to bring Sandro to the airport and make our way to LA. We stopped at the "Welcome to fabulous Las Vegas" sign to make some original (ha-ha) photos and also at a popular planespotting place to take photos of landing planes.
The drive back was nice, sadly Chris got pulled over by the cops for some minor speeding. We were all pretty tired and very thankful for Chris, who made all of this possible!
Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, Vegas (31.01.)
Breakfast at Holiday Inn was pretty nice, then we went to the grand canyon again to enjoy some nice views, also to the visitor center in order to get postcards. Credits for the photos go mostly to Henrieke since my battery was empty.
On the way back we discovered Bedrock City, a bizarre attraction we read about in John K's blog. the gifts in the gift shop looked like noone touched them for 30 years.
Bedrock city, the biggest attraction in Arizona.
We took the route 66 and stopped at a restaurant called Crackerbarrel for dinner. It had an awesome theming aswell as good food and a nice store that sold retro stuff attached to it.
Just before sunset we made it to the Hoover dam, parked the car and walked across the border to Nevada on the dam. The view was spectacular!
After a short drive we arrived at out hotel, the Planet Hollywood on the Las Vegas Blvd.
Everything was nice and big and the view from the room wasn't bad either. We just got our stuff up and went to see the fountains of Bellagio, which were across the street. Fabulous!
Fountains of the Bellagio with the Paris hotel in the background.
Saw the inside of the Bellagio, the Paris, the Venecian, Caesars Palace, had dinner at a McDonalds since everything else was too expensive. I found a Peter Lik gallery, awesome! I love this guy's photography! Too bad it's not quite in my budget.
The inside of the Venecian.
Aquarium in Caesars Palace.
I won 1$ at the slot machine, yay!
Saw the volcano of the Mirage and went back to the hotel since Henrieke wanted to go to bed, so Chris, Sandro and me went downstairs. We played some video blackjack in the PH casino, where I won another dollar, then roulette, where it took them 10 minutes to validate my austrian drivers license. I put 10 dollars on red and won, yay!
At the Bellagio I spent about 2$ on slot machines, which resulted in 2 free Mojitos and a coke. That was by the way where they filmed Oceans 11.
At 3am I finally went to bed after this quite eventful day.
Grand Canyon (30.01.)
Got up at 9:20 in the motel, then met up with Skuff, Lucky and Tally for breakfast at a bagel place. Went to wal-mart and got a universal charger for my sony camcorder which sadly turned out to be not working.
Saw lots of cacti...
...and later lots of snow. Had lunch at McDonalds at a rest station.
We first checked in at the hotel and then went to see the sunset at the canyon, amazing!
Took lots of photos and stayed until it was dark. Got some dinner at Wendys and ate it at out hotel room (salad this time, we can't handle any more burgers), also watched Mythbusters all evening.
Joshua Tree National Park (29.01.)
We (me, Henrieke, Chris, Sandro) got up at 9 I guess, had a minimal breakfast in our motel in yucca valley and started our drive to the Joshua tree national park. We climbed on lots of rocks and enjoyed amazing views, here are some photos:
Tyler was also there! We got some funny reactions from other people. 
At 1pm we started driving to phoenix, had a quick lunch break near George S. Patton museum (which had lots of tanks).
We picked up Mark at a truck stop, then went to a friends place in phoenix and had fun with her dogs. Went to pizza hut where we played with the toy trains while waiting for the not-bad-at all pizza.
We had a loooong artjam. Watched UP and Ratatoille as background noise. At 3am we went to our motel (after chris drove Mark back to his truck).
Starting our roadtrip (28.01.)
We kind of catched up on all the sleep we missed the last 2 weeks today, then went to the pharmacy, Ihop, Radioshack, a T-Shirt store that sold John K T-Shirts, a huge mall, Target, Disney store, etc...
This is one of 2 supercute cats that live in Tobis apartment!
The "small" mall a woman pointed us to. Looked more like an airport.
Chris and Sandro arrived at about 10, I had a quick shower and we started our drive to yucca valley.
Nothing but exitement found on US roadsides.
Bizarre.
We had a quick dinner at Jack in the Box, then went to the motel and to bed.
Disneyland (27.01.)
Chris gave us a ride to Disneyland in the morning, where we met up with Steve and Greg (who works there). Did Indiana Jones, Haunted mansion, Jungle Cruise and many other rides. We enjoyed alot of random trivia from Greg.
Steven, Henrieke, Greg
