City of Angels

Neither of us expected to like Los Angeles, the city of angels. We thought it would be sleazy, smoggy, and bumper to bumper traffic in an urban sprawl. However, as we had to go there to get our flight to Fiji we decided to spend a couple of days looking round before continuing on our journey.

As it happened, we had a great couple of days there. We took a bus from the airport to Santa Monica which was everything I hoped it would be - just like Sheryl Crow tells it! The beach was vast and swarming with holiday makers enjoying the sun, the surf and the old-fashioned funfair. The streets were packed with wanna-be musicians and other performance artists; acrobats, balloon twisters, even a man with bulldogs that did tricks (didn't approve of him). The shops were quirky and interesting, and we did some fascinating people watching. We stopped by at Muscle Beach for Brian to work out with the guys - he generously shared a few of his secrets for achieving and maintaining the perfect body before we continued on our way.

The second day we did a whistlestop tour of Beverley Hills (glamorous, glitzy, exclusive and not at all trashy), and Hollywood ( jolly, brash, slightly tacky, like Blackpool without the sea). We continued to Universal Studios for the afternoon, and despite the punishing heat (triple figures as they say in LA) we had a great time learning the tricks of the trade in the special effects shows and on our tram ride round the locations.

All in all, we learned that we shouldn't make judgements about a place till we've seen it!