The Start Of A Trip Of A Lifetime

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So after a teary goodbye at the airport with Mum I left her to go through immigration - had a dream run through and also through the Tourist Refund Scheme and before I knew it I was sitting in the departure lounge waiting for boarding.

Once boarded I was lucky enough to have a spare seat beside me.

As the main video screen wasn’t working and we had no individual screens I spent most of the flight talking to the guy sitting next to me and another guy dressed in full cowboy get up - both nice boys and I was grateful for the entertainment! Damn budget flights!!!

The flight was long and I was glad when we descended over a gloomy looking LA - the vastness of the city itself was surprising.

I motored down to immigration, happy to find myself near the front of the queue only to find that their computer systems were down and we would just have to wait… 2 hrs in fact. Most people sat down or laid down on the tiles. I was feeling slightly tired by now and as you can imagine since I had only 2hrs sleep on the plane, bringing my total sleeping hours for the past 3 days to a grand total of 10hrs!

So with immigration I motored off to collect my bag which I inspected on finding it, ensuring that all the locks were still in place, and rushed through a relatively uncomplicated customs check before finding where my shuttle for my hotel transfer leaves from.

It turned up after waiting about 20 minutes and 45min later I was at my hotel - however, even after showing them my vouchers and booking confirmations they are unable to find my room so once again a very tired Lisa waited while they searched and after another half an hour I told them I didn’t care if they couldn’t find my booking but they best be finding me a room. It wasn’t too long after that I then found myself in my more than adequate room at the Anahiem Holiday Inn.

When I woke I went down stairs and got my credit card back from the desk which they forgot to give back to me, and headed back to my room, there were 3 girls in the lift and one asked if I was on Contiki and it was Natalie, who had emailed me. We all decided to go to Downtown Disney but after waiting for shuttle bus that didn’t want to come we decided dinner in the hotel was a better option. So with that Amy, Kylie, Natalie, Sara, Jesse, Lauren and myself all ate together and told everyone their stories!

I ordered a chicken sandwich and they asked me if I wanted fried of fruit with that!?!?! Bit of a weird choice I thought.

I’m pretty happy so far, everyone seems nice and I’m sure we are going to have a lot of fun - off to Universal Studios tomorrow.

Next morning I met up with Amy and Kylie to do the Deluxe Combo Tour. We went through Hollywood, West Hollywood and saw the famous sign and the stars on Sunset Boulevard went down Rodeo Drive and a couple of other touristy things then onto Universals.

We all loved Universals… it was great, the shows and rides were fantastic! We went on all of them. Shrek was my favourite.

Got back at 7.35pm and went to our Contiki meeting where we met some more of our tour group - apparently there is going to be 42 of us, mostly Aussies and mostly females! Everyone seems really nice though!

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