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Published: October 4th 2008
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We drove through Malibu and down to Venice beach in around an hour or so. The scenery is quite pretty and were still finding the palm trees most amusing we seriously need to stop taking pictures of them!! Finally finding a place to park we set off for the short walk to the beach. I knew nothing about muscle beach but Tim had seen it on TV and was pretty keen to take a look. You cant miss the muscle element of this beach within a few minutes the small path breaks out into a large open area with a whole section dedicated to the real heavy weight lifters. At the time we arrived there was a competition taking place and the guys were pressing a serious amount of weight in turn. we watched for a while along with every other tourist finding it as fascinating as us and then we wondered on along the promenade. Passing basketball courts, lush grassed areas that lead onto the beach and then we hit the stalls. At this point it looks very much like Blackpool with allsorts of trinkets and fast food stalls. There are various little stalls with hippy looking individuals seeling everything
from chains to paintings and pictures. Then you have a collection of people dotted around between these stalls quite blantanly begging but what is different about this is that they are openly asking for money for their marajuana habit. Quite strange!! The best thing though was the street performers and we watched for sometime as these well toned and amzingly strong guys put themselves through various dangerous stunts for the amusement of the crouds (and hoepfully a tip at the end). One guy got a pogo stick out and actually sumasaulted through the air landing back on the pogo, he did this three times much to my cringing!! One wrong move and thats a rather smashed in head. They were very very good and obviously slightly deranged. unfortunately the weather was no over friendly to us and it was very overcast so we did not get the best shots of what is a very beautiful beach.
We only had two hours parking so we headed back to the car and out of the area north on the pacific coast highway. We drove for a few hours enjoying the views but somehow we missed a turning and ended up inland
which was not what we wanted but there was little we could do about it. As the day was drawing on we decided to find a town nearby and deck down for the night with the plan to get back to the highway and on track the next day. Quite strangely we ended up in a very small town called Santa Paula. It was a sunday night so we found that literally nothing was open. Hungry and with few options we saw a mexican restaurant open and ducked in there. Strangely everyone spoke spanish and we found ourselves scrapping in our brains for our spanish from weeks earlier. Watching the world go by we soon realised that the town itself had a very large mexican population and it was liek being transended back into south/central America, very weird. Our hotel was very nice too which was a bonus but the staff we a bit strange, hard to describe but just a bit weird.
We hit the road again early the next morning and back on the right highway thank goodness! This lead us to one of the most scary drives we've done since NZ. The road winds through the
hills right next to the coast high up in the hills and very very steep sheer drops. The views were good but quite honestly being on the wrong side of the car on the wrong side of the road did little for my nerves. still not used to the driving here so Tim is being great and doing my share!! even though the weather was hazy the views really are quite something we could have done with the haze lifting for the purpose of pictures though. From the coast we ended up in the Big Sur national park which was extremely pretty. We had hoped to be able to stay as the day was drawing on but the hotels were limited and quite expensive so after a very long day we ended up continuing out of the park and onto the next town of Carmel. We found a small hotel in our budget brochure and saved some dollars which is always good. It was surprisingly very cold which was a bit of a shock but we hot footed over to a restaurant had a wonderful dinner and tucked ourselves up in our large warm bed.
So were getting pretty
used to spending the day in the car at this point covering alot of miles to get to the specific places we want to see. Our next major destination was Yosemite national park so we had to get as close tot heir as we could. After Big Sur we were pretty sure that we would not be able to afford to stay there so we ended up in a small town nearby called Fresno. cheap hotels are great for the budget but we are obviously finding that they are not always in the nicest of areas. Queue local prostitutes and some rather dodgy looking characters. It was unusual and mildly entertaining but quite frankly those ladies we not exactly Julia Roberts believe me!!! It served its purpose though and we headed off to Yosemite very early the next day....................
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