L.A. - Navigation By Door Light

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Well I thought I’d give my mishaps of backpacking round Europe a bit of a break and write about some of the joys I had when I flew to LA with a few friends.

Now to give just a little background, a mate had been planning a trip with two of his fellow workers. A few weeks before they were due to fly out he asked me if I’d like to come along. Not being one to turn down a holiday I agreed, and proceeded to rush through the paper work.

We arrived at the airport, where I met the other two for the first time, and went to check-in. This is where things started to go down hill. The lady behind the check-in desk could not find any reference of me. And because I had booked the flight online, all I had for proof was a printed bit of paper with the reference number. So feeling a little panicked, I went to find the help desk for the airline. Eventually we identified that I had mistakenly bought tickets for the previous day, oh the shame. Half an hour later and a couple of hundred quid lighter, I had transferred my ticket to the correct flight and off we flew to the sunshine state.

We arrived fairly late in the evening, collected our luggage and picked up the hire car. Now hire cars are fairly easy to spot in America. They’re the small ones. Our car was no exception. We just about squeezed in with our luggage, and proceeded to locate our hotel. Now in my infinite wisdom, before I left for the states I had spotted a handy fold out map of LA, which extended out to about the size of an A4 sheet of paper. Complete with a small pen and compass, it was surly the ideal travelling companion. Wasn’t it? Well it turns out that the map makers decided to skimp a little on some of the smaller roads, and before long we were lost, despite what seemed like a simple set of directions.

A note to those of you who plan to hire cars: Make sure you know what all the buttons do, and how to work the car before setting off. It turned out that this particular make of car had a rather elusive interior light switch. We could not find it anywhere, and we needed to navigate! I suggested we pull over and open the door to turn the light on, however my mate who was driving, pointed out that the neighbourhood we were presently cruising round resembled New York’s Harlem. Not the sort of place a car packed with four white tourists and their luggage should be seen in. Instead we opted for a more unconventional approach. Opening the door slightly, whilst still on the move, I used the light to navigate our way to safety. We had survived day one of our stay in American.

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