Blogs from Venice Beach, Los Angeles, California, United States, North America

Having collapsed at the ‘Hacienda Hotel’ at 8:00pm on the 19th of Jan (first day in L.A), it seems I’m due for an update to the blog to try bring anyone reading this up to speed with this crazy adventure. Waking up on the 2nd leg of the 13 hour flight to L.A, my neck was at right angles to my body, my feet freezing, and my ability to concentrate lost in translation, I rolled up the blind on the window to expose a wonderfully bright day waiting outside. Breakfast eventually rolled around, and was again okay for maintaining some kind of bodily function. A slow 4 hours rolled by, and on the crack of 9:00am, was the first sight of land from the plane. However, this wasn’t actually LA, but a costal island just off ... read more

it's time to write my first official blog entry attempting to document my trip so far, which has found me in vast desert, dense forest, jaw dropping mountains, beaches, an epic lake, amongst the biggest trees in the entire world and in major cities.... you gotta love america! it all started on the 25th of august, when i landed in the crazy city of san francisco. i had spent a week in san fran around 5 years ago and fell in love with the place so was excited to be reunited with a city i already felt a connection to (as if going once and liking it somehow makes it yours!). i quickly learnt that either the city had changed in the past 5 years or i had... much more likely! i spent the first couple ... read more

So today was our final full day at Venice Beach. :( We didn't really want to spend the day lying inthe sun again and risk getting burnt any more than we already have, so we decided that we would save some money today and walk down to Santa Monica, hang out there and look around the shops, then walk back later on. We got up at about 8am, got ready and had some breakfast (waffles once again!), got our stuff together and hit the boardwalk for the long walk down to Santa Monica. As we got to Venice Beach, a guy in sunglasses came up to us with a clipboard asking if we wanted to be in a commercial, saying that there would be dancers, wrestlers and "maybe an elephant". We were pretty skeptical about the ... read more

This will literally be a really short one today (as opposed to us saying that yesterday and then writing quite a lot :S), as we really didn't do much today! We got up at around 8am again, lazed around a bit before getting ready for breakfast, where we both had waffles again. We came back up to the room and put some suncream on, and headed down to the beach a bit earlier than usual, ready for a day of sunbathing! We picked a spot a bit closer to the water so we could watch the surfers again and set down our towels ready to catch some rays! We stayed there for a few hours again, and Emma went in the ocean a couple of times (no lifeguard whistle blowing today so she stayed in a ... read more

Another day at the beach :( ... lol, j/k. We had planned on having a nice long lie-in today as breakfast is open until about 10:30am, but unfortunately, we both ended up waking up at about 6:50am and couldn't get back to sleep. Since this was way too early for breakfast we played on the netbook for a while in the room to kill some time before getting showered/dressed/presentable to go downstairs. This was our first morning at the hostel but we did have some idea of what breakfast consisted of after reading reviews on the internet. It was fairly simple; ready-to-use pancake/waffle batter, pans (for pancakes) and waffle irons (for waffles, duh) to make them! Emma opted to make herself a couple of pancakes in the pan, whilst Craig decided he'd try his hand with ... read more