Advertisement
Published: September 1st 2008
We headed back to LA after the delights of the canyons to travel up the coast on the famous Highway 1, but neither of us were really sure of spending much time in LA but thought we might as well see the city as we were here. It would have been a long journey to go direct from Grand Canyon so we stopped off a night to break up the journey, and as we had already been to Las Vegas, thought we would stop someone else... so we headed along a small part of the historic Route 66 and stayed in a small town called Twentynine Palms near the Joshua Tree National Park.
Situated in the Mojave dessert, the park has 1000s of the strange looking Joshua Trees, made famous by the U2 album, The Joshua Tree. Even in the harsh, dry and hot conditions, the park was covered in the Joshua trees along with huge rocks making the strangest formations in the desert. With all the trees it looked almost like a forest in parts with a back drop of a searing desert. We were hoping to see where the San Andreas fault was too, which wasn't too far
from the park but when we got up to the lookout point, cloud was rolling in down the valley below and we couldn't even see the valley floor, in the park and just about everywhere else was gorgeous blue sky, typical!
After visiting the park we headed towards LA, the park roads were extremely quite but it wasn't long before we were on a busy 6 lane interstate... still 100 or so miles from LA! We stayed in an area just east of Hollywood, and somehow we managed to negotiate the highways into LA without getting lost. The US roads are not that easy to navigate at the best of times, with hardly any notice before the junction you want, but LA was crazy having to cross multi lanes of traffic at each junction to get where you needed to go!!! Once we got to our motel we were close to a metro station, so we took that everywhere we needed, much easier!
We just did the main touristy things in LA as we were here for only a couple of days. We saw the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and wandered up and down looking for interesting stars,
such as Kermit the Frog and Bugs Bunny, however, most of the “stars” we had never heard of!!! We even saw someone getting a star, although it was a TV doctor, called Dr Phil, we think only famous in America as we didn't even recognise him! That was about it for our star spotting... we did the touristy tour around the stars homes where we saw the long driveways of the homes of stars such as Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts etc etc, some of the houses are so huge it really was like driving round a fantasy land. We had our pictures in front of the sign which was in the distance, at a lookout point also overlooking the city, but Downtown was covered mostly in sea fog or perhaps smog...
We hadn't seen a movie since New Zealand so where better to catch a movie than in LA, so we watched a couple of movies, X-files and The Dark Knight and we spent a bit of time just wandering around the shops enjoying some of the benefits of being in the middle of a big city. So different to what we had seen in small town America the
past couple of weeks!
To get out of the city we visited the beach at Santa Monica which was lovely and somewhere we would definitely visit again. It had a massive beach, and we had a walk along the boardwalk, watching people on bikes, roller blading, volleyball, weight lifting... it was a typical Californian sight, as we were sipping on a cool drink in a cafe people watching!
After a couple of days of city madness it was time to leave and start our journey up Highway 1 towards San Francisco. We actually enjoyed LA more than we thought, so crazy and such a big city, but it was interesting to see La La land for real rather than just hearing about it!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.196s; Tpl: 0.023s; cc: 13; qc: 66; dbt: 0.1443s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
