Phew!
I got to the airport to check in an oh it started from there. Donna and I got escourted to another area for a spot check. I have 2 bags with me, plus two hand-luggage. We passed and walked out of there fine (no probes!). The security person allowed us to jump the MASSIVE queue for check in. Luckily Sammy arrived and jumped in with us.
Oh but that's not all. Too many kgs in one bag so i had to reorg in front of everyone! The plane ride was good but didn't get any sleep as we were flying duing the day.
Arriving in LA was interesting. We managed to clear checks all ok but there was quite a bit of security!
We got a cab to the Ramada in West Hollywood at 830am and couldn't check in till 12pm!!
We were dead zombies needing a shower but hey, they decided to walk to the farmers market. I wanted to SLEEP!!!! The farmers mkt was a significant walk away and on the way down we walked past a great number of cool cool shops, we kept saying "ok we're coming back to that".
We had lunch there at the market and walked back to check out the great shops in the area. So many good shops! I have luggage problems so i couldn't purchase anything, but the cost of the stuff on offer was an even bigger problem.
From there we went back to the hotel to wait for my friend Heather (i met in austria) who i had arranged to meet for dinner that night. We had a bit of a nap and she didn't turn up. We waited for ages, made a nubmer of phone calls to her mobile and finally got her after missing her at the hotel. Oh i miss my mobile! It would have come in handy with meeting up and stuff, there was a few issues there.
W Hollywood is a bit of a gay area so we walked past some nice podium dancers with gold lame bum shorts (yeah no photos for ben!) sorry!!!
We had dinner and heather then drove sam and i to hang out in hermosa beach bar area. Very fun!! We hung with college kids and saw some interesting scenes including their weird desire to do karaoke! And also a Courtney Love wannabe. Donna went back to the hotel for sleep which was a wise thing to do.
As we were to stay with heather for a couple of nights she came to pick us up and our plan was to head to the beach. I can't believe how spread out everything is in LA! You have to drive everywhere and no one walks around. It's crazy.
We went to the beach that day a bit of a Military Base place with a power plant on the edge of the water, but the waves were good there apparently!
This is where Amanda caught her first wave, not standing up though!! Very exciting!
As we met Heater's friends and they were keen to hang out with some Aussies, they invited us to go on a Pub Crawl on Catalina! It was an expensive ride ($50 return) and the LA guy's got started early on Champagne and OJ for breakie! It was a beautifully sunny day so was excellent to go.
So we got there and was handed a map of the crawl path. We went to the 1st place for lunch, but at that point (possibly 5+ beers into the LA ppls) Heather, Donna and I decided to rent bikes and go for a ride around the island. Sammy had to represent and stayed hanging with Harrison and his college buddies.
We rode up a huge hill and flew down to the bottom on Wonder Years Style bikes which were waaaay to hard to manouver. My brakes were dodgy so that coupled with riding on the opposite side of the rd was FUN FUN FUN!! What do you do at a round-about?!?! Luckily my logic kicked in and i did the right thing!!!
Luckily we missed the kareoke pub and met up with the guys later and they were well and truely tanked. The ferry ride back was fun, for us! The drunks were not too bright and cheery. Sammy scored a number off a chick and he was very hot material for the girls on the pub crawl.
The next day was quiet, Heather drove us back to the hotel and we walked down Melrose for some shopping and checking out the local scene. There was nice trash and treasure market, where I scored some accessories, and there were too many shops to go into on Melrose but we had fun!
We departed from the kindness of Heather (she was amazing to drive us around like that) and had dinner at a Veggie place to the delight of Donna. She's great to travel with as she prevents me from eating CRAP!
Sammy wanted to go out on our last night in LA and I was keen to check out the scene also but was conflicted by tiredness! He decided on a place and so we jumped into a cab. Not knowing that it was SOOOOOO damn far away, we were $20 into the ride and we found the place didn't exist. So we were a little peeved, decided to truck on, committed to the cause, went to another place and that was great!!
It was an indie nightclub with pretty ok music, and a lot of gay guys unfort. We danced and had a few beers. We got home at 2am and woke at 4am for a 7am flight.
Leaving LAX is harder than getting in I reckon!! Sam got everything apart from the cavity search.
We finally got to our gate and thought we had a bit of time up our sleeve. We headed to the Admirals Lounge for some breakie and a rest.
When time came to get on the plane we moved, but ooooh no, we missed our flight!!!
Disaster! I don't know what we were thinking but it was dumb.
A kind check in lady managed to get us the next flight to NYC via Chicago! We arrived only 2 hrs later than planned as we stopped in Chicago. But this gave us the opportunity to catch up on phoning ppl and getting stuff organised, i.e. calling Aley to get the key for our NYC apartment!
We arrived in NYC safely and found a cheery Aley in our TINY TINY apartment which we are paying waaaay too much for.
General Rating LA: ****
General Rating the fuckups: *
Repeat Visit LA: *****