Road Trip - Los Angeles

And so our road trip begins!

Thanks to Alex's accumulated points on Qantas Airlines. We were able to redeem multi-stop tickets from Melbourne to New York via Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago.

As some of you may know, we had initially planned to take the Amtrak train across America before heading back to Raptor in Trinidad. However, we had to cancel that plan due to some unforeseen circumstances last December.

But now we're back on track and had a second chance to plan our trip. We decided to hire a car and drive around the West Coast instead. A ~40 hour train ride with no access to showers would not have been pleasant!

We landed in Los Angeles (via Sydney) in the early hours of 2nd September 2016. We had already pre-booked our car online ($592 AUD for 17 days), so it was just a matter of getting to the Thrifty office from the airport, complete some paper work and pick out the car. It was pretty easy, we hopped onto the shuttle bus and it dropped us right in front of the office. 

Day 1: After we picked up our car, we drove around looking to buy a local SIM card. You'd think it would be an easy task! But we spent almost a day, driving around, going from Best Buy to Best Buy searching for the best Telco and Plan. We finally settled with a 30 day plan with 10gb of data for $61 USD.

Day 2: With only 2 nights in LA, we tried our best to pack it in. We managed to check out two Farmer's Markets, walk on Hollywood Walk of Fame, get a glimpse of the Hollywood signboard, eat at Fatburger (which was delicious!), had an evening stroll at Santa Monica and Pacific Park to watch the sunset.

Hollywood Walk of Fame

Farmer's Market on Sunset Boulevard St

Fatburger!

Pacific Park

Santa Monica

Our airbnb accommodation in LA was located in Alhambra. We had a private room with an en-suite bathroom. Even though the room was clean, we couldn't say the same for the rest of the house. Dirty carpets, sticky floors, piled up rubbish. Not the usual airbnb we've experienced. Oh well..

Day 3: The day we depart for San Francisco. We had lunch at Kula Revolving Sushi Bar in Little Tokyo. A super belated birthday treat for Alex. The sushi was surprisingly good and very reasonably priced too at $2.25 USD a plate!

Belated Birthday Lunch @ Kula Revolving Sushi Bar

Some photos of the sushi ;9

After that, we had a walk through downtown, bought two metal soup spoons at Chinatown and watched an Aztec dance at Placita Olvera (Olvera Street - the birthplace of Los Angeles).

Aztec Dance

Olvera St

We left LA slightly later than planned and got caught in bad traffic near Malibu for 2 hours. Made a fuel stop at Santa Barbara before getting back onto the I-5 route. It took us about 10 hours (385 miles) to get to San Francisco. We arrived at Alice's place at almost 2am! Our sincerest apologies for arriving so late!