Days 313-315: Los Angeles, California

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Just outside of LA, we became particularly grateful for our GPS in the rental car and congratulated ourselves on the upgrade ;-) There are about a million LA exits, and even though Kristi had driven between LA and Vegas before, it was on a private coach and she wasn’t doing the driving! (and therefore not paying any attention to mundane things like road exits!)

Then suddenly, we hit the joys of rush hour traffic in Los Angeles - I think the last 5 miles of our trip took about the same time as the 100 miles before it! It was ridiculous! By this time we were quite late for dropping off our rental car, but we still had to get to our hotel on Hollywood Boulevard, drop off bags and then return to downtown LA to drop the car off! WELL, after dropping the bags off, driving from Hollywood to Downtown along the freeway again took what felt like FOREVER in rush hour traffic. We finally got to the hotel we were supposed to drop the car off and they wouldn’t take the car as the Hertz guy had already left for the day… argh! BACK on the motorway to the airport, it was pretty late by the time we got there and we had to beg our way out of paying another full day’s rental! Eek!!! But the lovely Hertz lady took pity on us at last! Finally we were finished with the car, and took the LA metro from the airport back to Hollywood Boulevard! Phew! We pretty much ate and then crashed out!

The next day we wandered along Hollywood Boulevard to the heart of things near the Chinese theatre, saw the stars on the pavement etc! Our hotel was really cool, it had a basketball hoop set up, so Martin got to play home b-ball for the first time in ages! As we had both been to LA twice before, on separate occasions, it was quite nice as there was no pressure to see all the main sights because we had seen them before. We spent the day just wandering around and then caught the movie “American Gangster” at the Chinese theatre there in Hollywood which was pretty cool!

The following day we had to post yet another box of stuff home (shopping from Vegas) ;-) and then headed off to Universal Studios where we spent the whole day going on all the rides and going to all the shows. It wasn’t a great day weather-wise but in terms of the park it was great as there were no queues and so few people around that you could go on the rides loads of times! Ha, yes, we’re genuine kids at heart! ;-) Of course Kristi always loves the back-lot tours and took a million photos of “Wysteria Lane” from one of her fave shows: "Desperate Housewives". After Universal it was time to hit Hard Rock café for a great dinner and then back off to Hollywood to prepare for our early flight out the next morning.

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