Believe It or Not

Last month I was invited to visit Ripley's Believe It Or Not in Hollywood. Honestly, it usually takes a pretty big event for me to venture into that side of town. But since Cindy and I remember the TV show fondly, we were excited to play tourists in our own city. It worked out great because JC's family was in town for the holidays and none of us had ever been to any of the Ripley's locations before.

We went on a beautiful Sunday in the early afternoon. The line was pretty long, so I was glad I had already printed our passes ahead of time.

From left to right: Jenny (JC's sister), me and Cindy (my cousin). Once we scanned the tickets, we saw the world's tallest man. Rick (Jenny's boyfriend) felt short, which doesn't happen all that often.

We saw some pretty amazing things - rolling my tongue wasn't one of them.

I was most impressed with the crafty creations. This model of Minas Tirith from the Lord of the Rings was created out of 420,000 matchsticks, 24,000 domino sized wooden blocks and 10 gallons of wood glue! Created by Patrick Acton, this model took nearly 3 years to complete and over 3000 man-hours to build.

Created by Rick Almanzan, this picture is made up of the words from the first 11 chapters of L. Frank Baum's novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

You may have already seen this when I posted it on Instagram. What's amazing to me is that the artist was able to actually see my post thanks to one of my followers who knows him. (Look in the comments). How flipping cool. There was also a Sex and the City piece, but I couldn't get a good photo of it without too much glare. We saw so many neat (and some very strange) things and enjoyed our outing. So if you're making your way to Los Angeles, I recommend spending an hour or 2 at the Odditorium. You can get discounted advance Ripley's Believe It Or Not tickets here.

I was given complimentary tickets in exchange for sharing my experience here. Photos and opinions are my own, and everyone had a fun time!