Travelling to LA

After a nice buffet breakfast at the Hampton Inn, we took a few photos and packed the car up. Just as we were leaving one of the back office staff came up to us and said that she had seen us taking photos outside and would we like her to take one of the two of us by the reception desk! We said yes please, and here it is.

 

So, it was back into the car and ready for a very long drive to Los Angeles. We had just over 300 miles to cover, which according to Google Maps would take us five and three quarter hours without stops! We had no sightseeing stops arranged for this leg of the journey – it was just one long stretch of driving!

We did stop for lunch at a rest stop:

Where there was also this sign

And of course Hugh had to go off and see if he could spot any sleeping! Fortunately he didn’t!

I took my turn of driving and we also had another rest stop for Hugh to have a snooze before we hit the outskirts of LA. Boy, I don’t like driving on the Freeways! I thought the M25 over here was horrid, but it’s nothing to the Freeways around LA! However, after a stressful hour and a half we arrived at our hotel – the Century City Intercontinental.

The parking here was valet only (although there were in and out privileges, so it wasn’t too bad) at a cost of $26 per night, but we couldn’t do much about that! We left the car and checked in and were shown to our room.

The view from the balcony was quite nice of LA and we could actually sit on it as it a) wasn’t too hot and b) there were no mosquitos!

We had problems with the internet here – you had to pay for it and the wifi didn’t work and the cable supplied was broken. We rang down to housekeeping and it took them over an hour to supply us with a new cable – altogether the service at this hotel was nowhere near as good as any of the other hotels we had stayed at.

We went to look at the menu for our evening meal. The food was not our ‘sort of thing’ at all – very fancy and dressed up if you know what I mean. The waitress also told us that they were all small plate meals and we would need 3 or 4 each to make up a main meal – there was only 1 thing each that we liked on the menu! So, we asked for our car and decided to go out and find a restaurant. We both actually fancied a Sizzler (one of our favourites when we had been to Florida) and so looked up the address on the internet, banged it into the satnav and off we went. Only to arrive and find it had been closed down! We then drove around, getting more and more desperate, trying to find somewhere to eat. We were both tired and scratchy with each other – the traffic was horrid and when we saw a restaurant we couldn’t find anywhere to park. In the end we went back to the hotel and into the bar and ordered a burger each! It wasn’t great and it was very expensive, but at least it filled a hole!

This hadn’t been the best day of our holiday! In fact, it was probably the least interesting and the most tiring day of the fortnight. We decided to put it behind us, go to bed and make our last two days as enjoyable as the previous 12 had been.