25/07/09 Saturday Day 345 After checking out we drove the 160 kilometres to Los Angeles. We are staying in Long Beach which is about 20 miles south of downtown LA. We eventually found our hotel, the Maya Hotel, which turned out to be about 2 miles from Long Beach itself. This didn’t look good at all. Luckily the reception lady told us that there’s a free bus that runs around the area. We were too early to check into our hotel so we dropped our bags in their storage room until we came back from dropping the car back to the rental crowd. We were dropping our car to Avis near the Santa Monica area, some 40 kilometres from Long Beach. Once we dropped the car we got a bus to one of the stops on ... read more

23/07/09 Thursday Day 343 Bit of a drive today to San Diego, some 220 miles in total with nearly all of it on a motorway. Thank god the car has cruise control. So handy! Also the amount of weaving by drivers on the motorway is nuts. There’s no rules at all by the looks of it! There was an awful amount of traffic going through Los Angeles but once we got past that it was full speed again to San Diego. We’re staying in Mission Beach which is on the north side of San Diego. We checked out a few motels and hotels near the beach. Most of them except the Mission Bay Motel had huge rates. After checking in we hit the beach again. Again being beside the beach, there’s loads of shops and restaurants ... read more

21/07/09 Tuesday Day 341 We headed from Monterey to San Luis Obispo on the 1 highway which goes down the coast of California. There’s some amazing views on the way although at times we were covered in fog which seemed to take ages to burn off. There’s a couple of small areas to stop on the way down, most of the places having only 1 shop, 1 restaurant and petrol pumps. We found oil coming out of the grill from the front of the car. We stopped at a place called Gorda for a spot of lunch. On closer inspection of the engine it turned out that the idiot at Avis who put the oil in didn’t put the cap back on so a lot of the oil spilled on the engine causing a lot of ... read more

17/07/09 Friday Day 337 After arriving in San Francisco airport we got our bags and headed for the train that goes into the city. The ticket machine is one of the most complicated I’ve seen. Basically you put in your money first and then start subtracting values until you get to how much your fare is. Luckily there was a member of staff on hand to help everyone! We got the train to the Civic Centre in the middle of the city. We should have gone one stop more to Powell Street. The walk from the Civic Centre to our hostel was quite dodgy. There’s a lot of homeless people and beggars and people generally acting crazy. We found out later that evening that it’s not a good area at all. After checking in we headed ... read more

01/07/09 Wednesday Day 321 Aloha Our flight wasn’t the best one at all. We were hoping we’d get tv screens in the back of the headrests in front of us but we didn’t. Instead there was one tv on the roof of the plane and another projected screen at the front of our section. We basically had to strain our necks to see the tv in the roof and we were too far from the projected screen. After the second movie, (first one was Duplicity, second one was 17 again), it was lights out and we all slept for a bit. First thing we noticed after getting out of the plane was the heat. It was about 9.30am and it was already 26 degrees. We’ve also made up a day by crossing the international date line ... read more