Self-Guided Getaways Sydney Bolen Self-Guided Getaways Sydney Bolen

This Christmas, Love Actually is all around (Central London)

It’s three weeks until Christmas, which means the annual Love Actually craze that consumes fans of all ages is well and truly raging. Even though the film just celebrated its 20th anniversary, the two-hour and fifteen-minute anthology directed by Richard Curtis remains evergreen and is now almost synonymous with the holiday season itself. All around London, cinematic showings and special events dedicated to the film have begun to fill the diaries of locals and tourists alike. With the lights sparkling over Oxford Street and the various Christmas markets in full swing, I couldn’t ignore the impulse to pay a visit to some of the filming locations. After all, since love actually is all around, the movie may as well be, too.

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Self-Guided Getaways Sydney Bolen Self-Guided Getaways Sydney Bolen

A Los Angelenos Guide to ‘Daisy Jones & The Six’

'Is Daisy Jones & The Six a real band?' if you read Taylor Jenkins Reid's acclaimed novel without adding that sentence to your search history, I will buy you a burger at Apple Pan. The world Reid created was so visceral and authentic that it was hard to believe the story was mere fact-laced fiction. Intertwined between the stories and retellings of lives made whole and torn apart by the oft-worshiped demon of "sex, drugs and rock and roll" are true historical events and many still accessible places. If you are a music history buff local to Los Angeles, it is likely that you are at least familiar with these sites, even if you have not been, such as I was. So, with the release of the hit Amazon Prime series bringing the real-world locations of Daisy Jones front and center again, my friend Shelby and I traded our cotton and polyester for denim and suede and set off hell-bent on following in the footsteps of a red-haired spitfire who took over the world–even if it was in a different way than she expected.

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