It's pretty self indulgent to go through this jaunt in three parts. It's hardly Lord of the Rings is it? So this'll be snappy.
After Cambria we roared off on the last leg of the journey towards Los Angeles. Everyone had said it was big before we got there but 'big' doesn't do it justice. This place is fucking humongous and hard, very hard to get one's head around when you arrive.
Our route took us up via Malibu and the Santa Monica boulevard which led us into a massive traffic jam for almost three hours. We became confused, tired, emotional and deeply lost in and around west Hollywood searching for a hostel which wasn't actually there. It had moved. Oh dear. After reluctantly turning on data roaming and locating the mother, we parked up and decamped to the pub only to be slapped with a ticket the next morning. The LAPD were on to us!
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| Los Angeles from the Getty Centre |
Other than being big, LA has got plenty of left, cosmic vibes. Hollywood seems like a Leicester Square, full of tack and tourists with a sizeable dollop of loonies smeared all over it. We saw one chap in a wheel chair dressed up as tiger speeding about the place wolf whistling at girls. There was an impromptu patrol of cop cars dating back to the twenties with a classic batmobile thrown in. In amongst the bonkers bits was Musso Frank's bar and grill, which is where the likes of Chaplin, Niven and Chandler called their local. So they'd come, like we all do, and get pissed, swear and shout at each other. The vibe in there is classic, golden years where the waiter looks a bit like Marlon Brando and you can drink an old fashioned which makes your mind spin. We did. It was mint.
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| An old fashioned in Musso and Frank's bar and grill |
What else? Almost too much to reel off. We saw the Capitol Records Building, drove through Beverly Hills (catching the end of the road Steve Martin supposedly calls home - it looked a bit boasty for us), walked down Rodeo Drive (out of Pretty Woman) and visited the Getty Centre for an injection of architecture and ideas and that.
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| Muscle beach - kiss the fist |
Our final afternoon was spent on Venice Beach - it's a weird little mile and a half stretch where you can get yourself prescribed weed and strut your stuff on Muscle Beach along with some saggy looking old fellas. We went for a mooch and ended up purchasing a grilled cheese doughnut. It was a meal which summed up us, our holiday and America in one fell swoop. Thanks for having us USA!
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| Grilled cheese doughnut |
If you're not utterly bored by this travel diary, then you can check out the first two parts both
hither and
thither.
