In 1984, when my family traveled to Los Angeles by cross-country train, we stayed with my mother’s cousin in Dana Point, about an hour south of the city center. This was not a part of the trip I wanted to recreate. Though C and I did visit that cousin when we went to California in 2016, she had moved to Carlsbad. That house from 1984 later slid off the cliffside. 

Instead, I had booked a hotel very close to the Hollywood Walk of Fame and the Chinese Theater, two sights I do remember us visiting in 1984. I did not want to drive around Los Angeles if I could avoid it. In 1984, mother and aunt rented an automatic transmission car that neither could drive very well (they were used to manual cars and my mom kept hitting the brake thinking it was the clutch), which made city driving even more….challenging. C and I could get to the sights we wanted to see on foot or by Uber.

Arriving three hours late following a 43.5-hour train ride, C and I were very eager to get off the train, get to the hotel for showers, and then for a walk to really stretch our legs. The sun was shining, the palm trees were swaying, and the temperature was in the mid-60s. 

Our luggage arrived quickly and I called an Uber. Our driver had his GPS set to Mandarin Chinese so I thought I would speak a little and this delighted both myself and the driver. At the hotel, we were lucky to be able to check in early, something we probably would not have been able to do had we arrived on time, so we also freshened up before hitting Hollywood Boulevard. 

Most of the walk to the Chinese Theater was quiet, that is until we turned onto the Boulevard itself. It was packed full of tourists, vendors, and folks in cosplay working the crowd for paid photo-ops. We saw people dressed as Freddy Krueger, The Mask (the Jim Carrey movie), Michael Jordan, the Joker, Spiderman, Mickey Mouse, a Transformer, and many more I just do not recall. There were a lot and it was hard to get past some of them. We popped into the Chinese Theater courtyard – mostly so I could tell C it was the same place I had visited when I was 11. And that was it. That was all we did in 1984, too! 

We got lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe. It has become a bit of a tradition for C and I, with us having dined in at least six Hard Rock establishments in the past three years. We were rather desperate to sit down at a table and eat in a restaurant, i.e. not fruit and granola bars from a bag at our coach seats. And there was the sensation still of rocking back and forth as if we were still on the train. The food and drink restored us and we were then able to get out and about.

We spent the rest of the day checking out various shops, especially Japanese and Korean fashion and goodies shops, and looking at the various celebrity names on the stars of the Hollywood Walk of Fame. At the time of my visit in 1984, there were around 1,770 Walk of Fame stars; but in December 2023 there were 1,000 more. We walked down to Thai Town, the only such ethnic Thai neighborhood officially recognized in the U.S., as C had a specific store she wanted to visit. On our walk back, we passed lines of vintage cars along the Boulevard. It was Saturday night and the classic and lowrider vehicles were out cruising.

On our second day in Los Angeles, C and I went to Universal Studios Hollywood. During my 1984 visit with my family, a visit to the theme park had been one of the highlights. This would be C’s first visit to a Universal Studios amusement park and we were eager to get on as many of the rides as we could. I especially wanted to take C on the famous Tram Tour, one of the few parts of the visit I remembered. The part of the tour with the mechanical great white shark from JAWS was seared into my memory.

Once in the park, I realized almost none of the current attractions would have been part of my 1984 visit. C and I were really looking forward to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, but think about it, the first Harry Potter book was published in 1997, 13 years after my trip to Los Angeles. The Revenge of the Mummy ride, the one C and I made a beeline for as soon as we got into the park, is based on the popular Mummy movie franchise; the first of those movies was released in 1999. The Kung Fu Panda Adventure? Based on a movie released in 2008. C and I were able to get on nearly all the rides at the park. Because the temperatures were in the 60s, we opted to skip the water-based ride as we did not want to get wet. I remembered teasing my younger brother about the Jurassic Park movies way back when, but then with the first one released in 1993, it did not go back quite as far as our 1984 trip. Even the Simpsons ride, though based on television’s longest-running American primetime show, would not have been around back then. The show first aired in December 1989. Oh my, I was starting to feel old.

The Universal Studios Park of 1984 (there was no need to designate it as the park in Hollywood as it was the only one of its kind: the park in Florida opened in 1990) was largely just stage shows. Animal shows, stunt shows, shows based on specific TV shows, and the tram tour. I remember seeing an Indiana Jones show. The first movie opened in 1981 and I had seen it probably 20 times. It was my favorite movie!

At least the tram tour through the Universal Studios backlot still has a few stops from 1984 – JAWS, the flash flood, and the Bates Motel. The icy tunnel, the collapsing bridge, and the terrible Battlestar Galactica sets were no longer there. It was kind of a shock to me to pass by the courthouse square that was such a huge part of the Back to the Future movies (my second favorite after Indiana Jones) and realize it would not have been there in 1984, as the first of the movies was not released until the following year. And yet my almost 12-year-old kiddo stared blankly at the set, as she was unfamiliar with the movies.

We spent all day at the park. It was Christmas Eve, and though the weather had been lovely all day with the sun up, as the sun set, it grew chilly. It was time to head back to the hotel to get some shut-eye before the next phase of our trip.