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Day 6: Sunday 22nd April Oooh, my head! Predictably, I woke up with a stinking hangover which was helped slightly by a breakfast of muffins and the rest of the champagne we didn't finish the night before. We sat watching the sun rise over the mountains, a really beautiful sight, and then quickly packed our things and took a cab to collect Ashley en-route to the airport. Heather and I were to fly to Los Angeles while Ash was going back home to England. Unfortunately for him there were a lot of delays and cancellations with his flights and we had to leave him to catch our flight, and he was eventually a day late in getting home. The flight from Vegas to Los Angeles was only about 40 minutes long, but it was a bit turbulent and the pilot insisting on doing long sweeping turns so everyone could see how beautiful the mountains looked did nothing to settle my stomach. You cannot enjoy L.A. unless you have a car, it's so big, and the public transport is pretty useless, so when we had picked up our bags we took the shuttle bus to pick up our hire car. And what a big beast it was, a Buick Century, much bigger than anything I was used to driving, but a lovely car nonetheless. I drove it around the car park a couple of times to try and get used to a left-hand drive car and, after collecting Heather, we hit the road. 
Anybody used to driving in Britain will definitely find driving in America difficult, apart from the most obvious difference being driving on the wrong side of the road. One of the best things was the street signs, which hang below the traffic lights at junctions so it easy to see when you should turn off. Not so easy is getting onto the freeways, these have tiny signs pointing to what is often just a gap between two buildings that is actually the freeway entrance. The Americans have not invented the roundabout yet, so don't expect to ever see one of those, it's all junctions. After a couple of wrong turns, which are quite easy to correct because most cities are a grid system so if you miss your exit you can just keep turning right until you end up back where you started, we made it onto Highway 101 North and headed for Hollywood where we had booked a room at the Beverly Laurel Motor Hotel. 
We chose the Beverly Laurel because every hotel review we read recommended this place, and it sounded a fun place to stay. It has a retro 50's styling, with all the rooms facing into the courtyard which has a swimming pool. The rooms themselves are quite spacious with a small kitchen and a bathroom, the bed has photographs set into the head-board, and one wall in every room is painted blue for some reason, all in all very kitsch. There was some confusion because the first room we were given had twin double beds instead of the single queen size we had requested. This was soon sorted out by the manager who, when we told him we were on honeymoon, upgraded us to a room with a king size bed. To be honest, after all the excitement of Vegas, and only getting about 4 hours sleep a night, we were totally exhausted so we decided to just take it easy for the rest of the day and catch up on some sleep. That evening we ate at a diner called "Swingers" that was built into one corner of the hotel. In keeping with the rest of the hotel, Swingers was designed as a 50's style diner with a bar and nice little booths. It was a very popular place to eat with the alternative L.A. crowd, and the food was really nice and reasonably priced. We left the diner and crawled into bed for our well deserved early night. |
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