Los Angeles here we come

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Home to Los Angeles

At last the much-anticipated day has arrived and we are on our way to California. Holiday is to celebrate Bob’s big birthday, his 70^th, in August so we are going De Luxe. A fly-drive round California, a place we’ve both always wanted to visit but up to now have missed on our travels.

The suitcases were all packed well in advance so we could leave at the crack of dawn to catch our midday flight from Heathrow.

Up at 4.30am and away within the hour. The UK weather has of course decided, suddenly, to be glorious after a dreadfully long cold winter and equally cold and wet Spring, in fact one so bad we never really had one.

Enough of moaning about the English weather as we headed down the M40 in lovely sunshine feeling, really rather excited about our trip.



We arrived at Heathrow in plenty of time after leaving the car at Purple Parking. All very easy with the only hitch being that our BA flight departure was delayed by almost an hour because of some minor problem with lighting. The flight was as ok as a 10-hour flight can ever be and as the actual flight time was down by an hour we still arrived at the 3pm which was scheduled.

Once at Los Angeles it took 2 hours to get clear of the airport and to the Dollar car hire office to pick up our car, a Mustang, exactly according to the specification on our Fly America Deluxe Fly drive tour.

Our hotel for the night was only just round the block, the Airport LAX Marriott so Bob quickly worked out the basics of driving this totally unfamiliar car, we squashed the cases in (one on the back seat but we had expected that) and drove there. We ‘self parked’ at the hotel as that at $23 was cheaper than being valet parked. We believe it is only in LA and San Francisco where we will have to pay these extortionate parking charges.

It seems that in the USA hotels tend to charge for parking in their car parks while you stay in their hotels.



All very easy, we are so far impressed with the arrangements. We were surprised that it was not hot and sunny; in fact it was really quite grey. Have always assumed that LA is very much a Californian sunshine sort of place but not today.

No problem. We were too tired to want to go out as our body clocks were telling us it was well past midnight so we had a quick and easy meal in one of the hotel eating spots then crashed.

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