Your Most Memorable Vacation
My Exciting Trip of a Lifetime
By Maxine Troxell
This is a new feature that will continue with community contribution. Tell us your story about your most memorable vacation, your trip of a lifetime, and it may be featured in a future edition of The Catoctin Banner!
It’s December 2007, and I had just heard that Bob Barker, from The Price is Right show, was retiring in June. My friend, Karen Johnson, and I thought it would be great to see him before he retired. So, we started to plan our trip to Los Angeles, California. We asked our friend, Donna Jones, if she would be interested in going along, and her answer was yes. We decided to send for tickets for the April 16 show. All three of us ordered tickets to be sure we got the tickets we needed. The tickets were sold in a lottery-style. Meanwhile, I booked the hotel for us, and Karen booked our flights. We also booked a couple of other tours of Los Angeles.
The tickets finally arrived three weeks before the show. To our surprise, the tickets were for Bob Barker’s Million Dollar Spectacular show, his last show ever. Wow, were we excited!
The day finally arrived for our flight, Thursday, April 12, 2007. The three of us were extremely excited to go. We arrived in LA around 4:00 p.m. We rented our vehicle, and we were soon on our way to the Farmers Daughter Hotel in Hollywood. The hotel was right across the street from the CBS Studio, where The Price is Right was staged.
While in LA, we took the Grand LA Tour, where we toured through the Hollywood Bowl, Griffith Observatory, Sunset Strip, Hollywood Walk of Fame, Capitol Records, Rodeo Drive, the Farmers Market, and lots of other famous places.
We also took the Dearly Departed tour. On this tour, we got to see a lot of the stars’ homes (Lucy and Desi, George Burns, Jack Benny, Ozzie and Harriet, and a lot more). While on the tour, we saw Bob Barker walking his dog. We rode right past him, waving and smiling. He gave us a smirk back.
On Saturday night, around 10:00 p.m., people were already forming the line outside of the CBS Studio for our Monday The Price is Right show. Luckily, we found two girls from Pittsburg who needed tickets and shared our extras with them. In exchange, they said they would hold our positions in the line so that we could do other things before the Monday show. On Sunday, we went to Venice Beach, also known as Muscle Beach. There were lots of things to see and do there.
On Monday morning at 6:00 a.m., everyone who wanted to get into the show needed to be in line to get “order of arrival numbers.” Our numbers were 23, 24, and 25. We were instructed to return around 8:00 a.m. when they would start to process our tickets, take our social security numbers, and get our name tags (I still have mine).
They divided everyone in groups of 12. Each person in each group was interviewed by the producer. You needed to get excited, and it had to be natural for you to get picked as a contestant.
At 2:30 p.m., we finally entered the studio. What a thrill that was! We were seated in the third row, dead center (we are the ones pictured above in the yellow shirts). The studio is much smaller than it looked on television. Cameras were everywhere, and it was really noisy.
The producers wanted us to get really excited. Although my friends and I were not chosen as contestants, we had a great time. I’m sure that when Bob saw us in the audience, he must have said to himself, “Oh no! There are those three girls again.” We can still watch the show on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tla16gSFqw8.
This was really a fun trip of a lifetime!
According to Biography.com, “Bob Barker started out in entertainment in 1950 with his own radio show, The Bob Barker Show. In 1972, he joined the popular television game show The Price Is Right. By the time Barker retired as the show’s host in 2007, after nearly 35 years, The Price Is Right had become both the first hour-long game show and the longest-running daytime game show in history.”
Bob Barker celebrated his 97th birthday on December 12, 2020.
