USA Road Trip - Day 32 (Las Vegas, Nevada to Los Angeles, California) then Home !!

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Up at 9am, and need to reorganize all the luggage before we check out at 11am as the luggage limits are quite different for domestic flights here in USA compared with the flight back home on Virgin Australia. We have to put more stuff in checked in baggage and less in our carry on luggage. I really need to do something with the little purple suitcase as we only get 7kg carry of limit and it weighs over 3kg when it is empty ! I forgot to mention last night how I saw something I had never seen before when we were in Fremont Street. I went to the loo at the Golden Nugget Casino and there was a special container on the wall to place your can/bottle of beer in whilst doing what we boys do ! Everyone was bringing in their bottles of bud light or corona or whatever and not missing the opportunity to have a swig on the run so to speak ! In fact there was room for two bottles for each urinal and I hate to imagine why you would want or need to have two bottles of beer whilst visiting here ! Somebody had left half a bottle of corona in my spot and I can assure you I had no inkling of having a sip. That is, I think it was half full of corona beer or was it ummm ?????? (let’s not go there). It is a beautiful sunny day today and expected to reach 27 degrees here and a bit warmer in Los Angeles. It has been a great place to stay at The Linq. Very central, pretty airy casino (e.g. not full of smoke as compared with many others). We had stayed in room 21502 at the Linq which is on 15^th floor facing Las Vegas Boulevard (aka The Strip). There are 4 towers here and you definitely want to stay away from the front tower where they play live music down below (very loud) until 2am every night ! I noticed they had a fast checkout service where you look at your account on the TV and if OK it’s just charge to your Credit Card. We had about $112-00 on our bill which I figure was the upgrade fees we agreed to when we checked in. Problem was they had my Qantas Cash Mastercard on file and we have spent all the money on this prepaid card so it won’t work so we have to line up downstairs and check out the old fashioned way. Whilst in line I am reflecting on our first night when we had the soiled bed issue at 2am. When I am asked ”how was my stay” I decide to share the story and make the comment we got not no apology. She is quite embarrassed and wants me to email her Manager and show the photo I took as they outsource housekeeping and want to know about these stories. She offers to make our first night complimentary, so instead of paying them they actually refunded me some money. Nice start to the day ! Kerry made a good choice booking here as we did get to see different areas of the strip than we had seen before. It will probably be a while before we come back here but New York, New York or Monte Carlo would be good options for next time with the new dining precincts in that area and the T-Mobile arena next door to catch a big show. We head off in the shiny blue Camry and before long we are in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Kerry is taking some nice pictures of the scenery. We kind of have a loose plan to stop at Barstow which we have done twice before where we go to the outlet centre and have a burger at In-N-Out. However prior to getting to Barstow we kept seeing these advertising signs for Peggy Sues Diner @ which is in a small town called Yermo. We decided to stop and try it out. I grabbed one more Route 66 burger and a Strawberry Milkshake and let me tell you this place was the most authentic Route 66 experience we had on the journey. Booth seats, old fashioned milkshake glasses (with that all important scoop of cream on top), waitresses in period uniforms, and a gift shop with all sorts of old fashioned memorabilia. In fact I would purchase another licence plate here for Kansas (something to do with Wizard of Oz and a place called Toto or is Toto the dog’s name ??). I also found a neat plaque here with advice about how to handle teenagers which I wish I had known several years ago (check out the picture attached !). Shortly after leaving here I can see some sort of military base in the desert with massive sheds, and then I see lots of tanks. Why here I ask ? Turns out this place has a massive Marine Corps Logistics Base and I guess they want it far away from where everyone lives in case some bombs accidentally ignite. We eventually find our way over the top of the mountain range and down into greater Los Angeles. We have done this drive twice before but never in this direction (which explains why we have not stopped at Peggy Sue’s before) and the scenery is nothing short of amazing and constantly changing. It seemed to take forever getting through LA with all the freeways and traffic everywhere. Our plan was to get to LAX Airport around 9.30pm after dropping off the hire car. It was now around 6pm so we had some time to kill. We decided to head to Santa Monica where we stayed several for a few nights back in January 2008 at the back end of a previous holiday here. We managed to find parking one block from the famous 3^rd Street Promenade for only $1.00 and went for a walk on the promenade where they had heaps of excellent buskers performing. We had dinner at Café Crepe and the crepes were beautiful and pretty cheap too ! Kerry had the fresh Baby Spinach with Feta for only $7.95 and I had the Chicken, Swiss Cheese and mayonnaise for $8.95.The last time we were here 8 years ago they were closing down a shopping mall where they had some unbelievable bargains and a department store where everything was on sale for less than 8 bucks. I could not remember the name of it and Kerry is struggling to remember it too and says “”Tom & Jerry’s”. Nope that is not it. Never mind the name may come back to us later. We see the shopping mall has now been rebuilt so we head over the have a look, and I see that Nordstrom has free Wi-Fi so we wait just outside the front door and do a skype session with Elise and despite her incredible memory she can’t think of the name of that department store either. It’s frustrating me and I recall buying this blue and white jacket there quite clearly. The reason I remember it so well is that on when we came back here 3 years later in 2011 I was waiting out front of our hotel in Las Vegas and some guy came up to me who had exactly the same jacket on and asked if I bought it from Santa Monica at “……. whatever the name was …..?”. It’s getting late now so we decide to head to LAX. First I have to fill up the car with fuel and the price here is $2.79 per gallon. Outrageously expensive since we paid only $1.59 in Carolinas. No choice, so in it goes. As both of our monthly roaming phone plans had expired overnight we are relying on Mr Tom Tom today on his own (there was so point in paying another month for 1 day’s use). Within 2 minutes we are on I10 West a major interstate, and suddenly and without any prior warning Mr Tom Tom freezes up ! I am now heading West towards Arizona, Texas, Louisiana and Florida without any idea where to get off this road and no iPhone to help me (not funny Mr Tom Tom !). I have literally no idea where to get off this road, and I am frantically trying to reset Mr Tom Tom with one hand whilst driving with my other hand on a busy Interstate on the wrong side of the road (for me anyway). But you know me. I am calm, relaxed an totally in control ! The truth is I got lucky, as I saw an exit sign saying LAX and crossed abruptly through three lanes to swiftly take the exit. Mr Tom Tom finally resets itself now and we are all good again. 10 minutes later and we are at the Hertz depot around 9.15pm just as planned. They have a shuttle bus that takes you to the terminal building but this nice chap offers to take us there in our Camry so we can leave the luggage in the boot. Great. We had a chat with him and he explained the price of petrol here was expensive because they had a special additive to help deal with all the pollution and higher taxes as well. We are now finally here at LAX, all the driving is now done we can relax and get ready for the short 14 hour flight home. Kerry out of nowhere shouts “Steve and Barry’s”. No it’s not someone she knows at the airport, that is the name of that department store in Santa Monica that we went to 8 years ago, she suddenly remembered it. Usual delays getting through security but filled in the time. We boarded and left the terminal building right on time at 11.55pm and the plane was quite empty. We had exit row seats 26J & 26K, but Kerry decided to move forward and grab and empty row of 3 seats so she can lay down and have some sleep. In fact I reckon there was at least 20 people who did this to give an indication of how many empty seats there was. It actually took around 35 minutes of taxiing before we took off as they changed the runway we were going to use at the last minute. They gave us dinner fairly early and then we are supposed to go to sleep for 12 hours !. Kerry tried this and I decided to watch a movie. First up was a Sandra Bullock movie called Our Brand Is Crisis. It was about a political campaign in Bolivia and it was OK but I barely managed to get through it (maybe it had something to do with the fact I was a bit tired ?). I think I had a short nap and checked on Kerry and she looked to be sound asleep which is good. I later watched another movie which was Kingsman, The Secret Service starring Colin Firth. It was good with a bit more action to keep me awake. I changed my watch to home time so I could easily track how long to go before we arrived. Kerry would later wake up and I told her it was only 3 hours until we got home. It did not go down too well when we realised I had incorrectly rest my watch and it was still 5 hours to go ! Despite her best efforts to look like she had been sleeping Kerry did not actually get the long rest she had hoped. We were both really tired when we arrived home around 7am. We did the new immigration self-check in thingy which was really fast, but decided to declare we had some nuts (all we had was packaged stuff so did not need to declare it really)to get through customs quicker but not such a good idea as everyone was declaring things as well and it actually took a lot longer (remember for next time !). Our driver from ATC was waiting for us and he had us home by 9am. Muffin (our Shih Tzu) was very excited to see us. We had missed her and the kids too but it was now time to end this blog of another great USA adventure. We ended up driving for 4538 miles or 7303 kilometres so we managed to see quite a lot across the 11 states we got to visit including 7 new ones (only 17 more to see now ). Back to the real world once more !

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Comments

[Kathy Mills]

Welcome home
Hi guys, I just wanted to thank you for the trip. I looked forward to and really enjoyed sharing in your travels. I think I will miss your comical descriptions Andrew. Glad you had a great time, lots of sight seeing and driving, well done. Look forward to a coffee soon Kerry. Call me when you are feeling like catching up. Kathy