Advertisement
Published: November 26th 2008
Edit Blog Post
Sunset 2
Looking out to sea as the sun sets It has dawned on us while looking through our blog that we never wrote anything about our brief stay in LA. So, albeit a bit late, I've decided to try and write about what I remember of our visit....
We got up pretty early in the morning to get on the bus to the train station in San Francisco and having walked to the bus stop with our bags we were convinced by a homeless guy to buy him a cup of coffee and a pastry since he had tried to help us find the bus stop. When we returned from the shop he complained that there was no sugar in the coffee or jam for the croissant! We had a relatively short train ride followed by a bus trip in the central station of LA where we arrived to gorgeous sunshine and hot weather. We were staying 21km south of the main centre in the vastness of LA county for a relaxing time at the beach. With one bus change to make it seemed that there would be no problem, the friendly bus driver pointed out to us where we should get off and change and we waited. Looking
Palm Tree
On the street with our hostel at the timetable it appeared that we were a little too close to Compton for our liking and managed to attract yet another weirdo who had just been kicked out of his housing (provided by the church), had various medical conditions that he felt obliged to tell us about and wouldn't stop talking at us. We finally arrived at the hostel where we met our roomies in what was little more than a box room with two sets of bunkbeds in. Despite this, the hostel itself was nice, our roomies were good fun and it was only about 50m from the beach. After a bite to eat and a quick walk down the pier and along the sea front we retired to our beds after a full day of travel.
The next day we decided to relax on the golden beach. The beach was really pretty and clean and was deserted while we were there. The waves were a bit too big for us to go swimming in the sea for long although it was a nice way to cool off from the sun. We settled into reading our books and somehow managed to both nod off in the
Hermosa Beach
Our hostel was just to the right on this street midday sun. When we woke, about an hour or two later, we both had pretty bad burns on our backs and decided to call the sunbathing to a halt for the day. While Stephanie went for a pedicure and pampering session I took a walk along the road to Redondo beach for a look around. It had the usual ice cream shops and tourist shops as well as a small amusement arcade and long pier. When I got back to our hostel to meet Stephanie she was nice and refreshed with a small flower hand-painted on her big toe that she was very impressed with.
The following day we caught a bus and train to Hollywood where we went in search of a good view of the famous sign. Having walked for miles in the relentless sunshine we were both too hot and decided to be satisfied with the view we had got and returned to the glitz of Hollywood Boulevard. We walked along reading the names on the stars, including Kermit the frog, and trying to deal with the totally tacky feel of the neighbourhood. While we walked along we were accosted by a man running one of
Sunset
The sun begins to set on Hermosa beach the many celebrity mansion tours however neither of us were particularly interested in doing this so said no thanks and carried on walking only for him to shout after us "Oh, but you're happy to walk along reading the stars!", it didn't seem to make much sense to us that he could suggest that they were anywhere near the same thing so we just laughed to each other and continued walking along. After the long return journey on public transport we headed up to the shopping centre near our hostel and went to the cinema.
My final day was spent down near the beach, not sunbathing due to the previous experience, catching up with my journal while Stephanie went back up to the shopping centre for a spot of shopping. The area out by the beach was a nice place to have spent our brief stay in the county and we collected our bags from the hostel before heading to the airport for the long overnight flight to NZ
Advertisement
Tot: 0.1s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 12; qc: 50; dbt: 0.0556s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb