It's Summer in California

We're quickly adjusting to the balmy Californian weather - both slightly sunburnt from sitting in the top deck of 'Hop On - Hop Off' buses as we find our way around Los Angeles. Did the obligatory Hollywood & Beverly Hills loop on the afternoon we arrived - I was pretty proud that we had the oomph to do so after the 13 hour, very little sleep flight - but we did. Also walked the 1km from our Bed & Breakfast (which is quite good - quite exuberant hosts, nice location in a street lined with 30m + palms) and walked the "Stars Walk of Fame" on Hollywood Bvd. We found our stars fairly quickly, as you see in the photos, but unfortunately they don't seem to have updated Penny's to her married name, despite having had 40 years to do so!

...And I've just noticed, the photo of mine has the name partly obscured... shame! I'll have to come back another time & rephotograph it!


Well, after a day in Santa Monica where we dipped our toes in the Pacific Ocean 12,000km from home, and another exploring Los Angeles Downtown, we spent yesterday 'doing' Universal Studios. Though usually not ones for amusement park rides, we were both quite impressed with the movie backlots tour, (featuring, among other stuff: dinosaurs attacking, and King Kong defending, the trams we were riding in; a dismembered 747; an underground train station collapsing in on us, and a 30+ year old shark model lunging at us ). So much so that we went around a second time! The WaterWorld  show, based on a movie I haven't seen, was also rather spectacular, particularly when a life size, burning, small aircraft crash landed in the water right at the front of the audience. Getting to Universal Studios involved catching the Metro train. Los Angeles Metro uses a 'Tap Card' system, as in London, and as was proposed for Sydney. It's hard to see how it was going to be so difficult and expensive to implement in Sydney! Interestingly too, the LA Metro stations were completely unstaffed - tickets and 'tap cards' had to be purchased from machines, which was a little tricky for us first timers!
This morning we packed up, got a shuttle to the Airport and flew (on a small CRJ200 twin Jet, for those interested,... e.g. Dan,) to Las Vegas, where it is seriously HOT. 100+ Deg F. Very interesting flight over the California desert, where we saw CROP CIRCLES!! [Actually, I suspect, patches irrigated by circular traversing sprinkler systems.]
On checking in at the Tropicana Las Vegas Hotel I was pleasantly surprised to find the hotel provides FREE WiFi (all the research I had done seemed to suggest hotels are all charging for WiFi). There was a slight catch, in that I had to open a browser & 'OK' a disclaimer for the hotel before I could open my email or browse further. So hopefully I may get to post this blog soon! We did a short walk up 'The Strip' (a 10 lane highway with ornate hotels, casinos, shops etc along both sides, but requiring bridges to cross from side to side due to said 10 lanes of traffic), ducking frequently into the hotels, shops and casinos periodically to revive in their air conditioning!
Tomorrow we meet up with the Trafalgar Tour group for our 14 day Scenic Parks Explorer tour which will take us through Utah, Yellowstone, Sth Dakota, Colorado & back here via the Grand Canyon and various other great and remote parks. Looking forward to that! I am also, of course, looking forward to the Outlet shopping trip Penny has planned for the morning!

Observation: lots of black cars in Los Angeles. More than in Sydney anyway. Also, lots of Toyota Priuses, even as taxis.

Second Test Transmission - Countdown

Well, we're off tomorrow. Up until this evening I would have said we were the best prepared ahead of time for any trip. Well, we really are quite ready, but I just had a minor crisis with getting our mobile phones set up for overseas use. I thought I was pretty smart - bought travel SIMs that give good call rates, are free for family to call us and  do not allow data downloading to inadvertently chew up the dollars. Which would all be good if they just WORKED properly on my phone! After two calls to the very friendly help desk, and several power down - power up and SIM change exercises during which they got it ALMOST working, I was advised to call Motorola (phone manufacturer). Oh dear, just what I didn't want to happen the day before we go. I had even given it a trial run earlier in the week and after a little jiggery pokery battery removal & replacement therapy it had seemed to work!

So I stopped and sulked a while over dinner, then went back, gathered my thoughts to give to Motorola, turned it on for 'one last try': and it worked! Only once, but that will do me for now! Too late for more messing about. I'll take my good old reliable (if expensive to use OS) Telstra SIM as a backstop, and both SIMs work in Penny's Sony phone, so we're OK. 

Anyway that apart, all is prepared. The garden fed, watered & mulched, food dealt with, pack-up-able house stuff packed up, grandchildren hugged, kids phoned; bags packed, checked, rechecked, more stuff added etc. Actually, we seem to be remarkably under our baggage weight limits this time. Penny thinks that can be taken care of with a bit of restorative shopping in America. We'll see.

Enough from here. This should test to see if my Blogging skills are on track. Hopefully the next one you get may actually have some travel tales in it.

Starting the Blog

Starting the Blog.

Well here goes! An attempt to diarise our forthcoming trip to the USA vis the medium of BLOGGING. Hopefully it will at the same time enable friends and family to keep track of where we are at, as we have effected on previous trips with emails.

But before we go, I need to get familiar with Blogger... I feel very much the trainee at present! I hope to sideline Joanne for a training session during her stay here this weekend. See how we go!

There will probably follow a few meaningless posts now while I try to master this, so apologies for the boring bits!