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Published: November 8th 2015
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Los Angeles
The last stop on our trip was Los Angeles. Some of our friends had been to Los Angeles before and said it wasn’t the easiest city to get around so we considered hiring a car, but then we found we could get a bus from the airport to Santa Monica for $1 each on the Big Blue Bus and we couldn’t pass up on that offer. We chose to stay in Santa Monica. We ate out an a Mexican place near us on the first night which was really good.
Next day we were booked to go on a Warner Bros Studio Tour. We set off two hours early but we still managed to be late, public transport in LA is awful! We had to get an Uber for the last part of the journey, if I was going to do it again I would have just got an Uber the whole way. We enjoyed the studio tour, we had a look around some of the sets they use when filming. We also went in the Harry Potter museum which we weren’t too fussed about. We had a look around an active Pretty
Little Liars set. The highlight for me was sitting on the actual couch from Friends! From the studio we tried to make it up to the Hollywood sign but a road that looked open on Google Maps was actually closed so we spent several hours walking back to Hollywood as we couldn’t find a bus. Bad times. We ate at the Hard Rock Café in LA which was pretty average then caught the bus back to Santa Monica.
Next day we borrowed one of the bikes from our AirBnB place and went to the beach. Oli rented skates and we skated and biked all the way down past Venice beach until the bike path ended. Then we biked up the other way and went past Santa Monica pier and back down. We did some shopping at Whole Foods, a store I wish we had more of in England.
On what was supposed to be our last day we ate all of our remaining food from Wholefoods and packed up. We were sat with our bags packed ready to leave when Oli checked his phone and noticed he had a text from Norwegian Air to
say our flight had been cancelled! It didn’t give us a new flight time, just said to find a hotel and they would reimburse the cost. We slowly realised this could actually turn out to be a good thing, as we’d not got everything done on our previous day in Hollywood. We got on hotels.com and booked a room at the Loews Hotel in Hollywood, then we took an Uber over there. I would definitely recommend Uber for travelling around LA, it was so cheap and quick! We headed over to our new hotel and checked in. The room was very swish, but we love using Airbnb, in all the places we stayed we had access to a kitchen, some places had free bikes we could use and other little perks.
We went straight out and walked towards Griffiths Observatory which is where we were hoping to end up the previous day but ran out of time. It was still blazing hot at 4 in the afternoon and it was a good few miles walk to the observatory up a rather steep hill and we didn’t take any water with us so by
the time we reached the top I was exhausted. We had a wander round the observatory, the views from the top were amazing, you could see all sides of the city including the Hollywood sign. We headed back down towards Hollywood, we went for a Thai meal in Thai Town which was awful, the meat was really fatty and we couldn’t finish any of it. We finally got a text to say our flight would be at 5:10pm the next day. Then we got a text later saying it would be 3pm. We had breakfast at 25 Degrees, it was nice but nothing special and the waiter got my order wrong. Then we went for a swim in our hotel’s swimming pool overlooking the Hollywood sign. We got $50 voucher from Norwegian Air to spend on food at the airport. Everyone had boarded the plane and was seated by 3pm, it was a horrible worn old charter airplane. Then we sat on the tarmac for 2 hours waiting for it take off, eventually taking off at the original time for 5:10pm! What ensued was not a great end to the holiday, a cramped, hot journey on an old plane with
awful food but we didn’t let it ruin our holiday.
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