LA: Day One, 30 June

As I said in my quick post yesterday, we have arrived in the USA!!!! It has seemed like such a long time coming, yet the last few weeks have flown by. It still doesn't seem real that we are here!

We had great flights, Air New Zealand were fantastic to fly with. The air stewards were great - one of them was even going up and down the aisles making balloon animals for the kids on board!

The little koala is our travelling buddy. We aim to take a photo everyday with him in it somewhere, and give him a name - still figuring that one out!

We survived the 5 hour stopover in Auckland - although we were definitely relieved to be back in the air and continuing on to LA.

We were prepared for a long wait getting through customs, but thankfully that went smoothly. Our plane was the first of two or three to arrive around the same time, so we were able to get through immigration near the front of the line. Amazingly our bags appeared on the carousel as soon as we were finished being fingerprinted, so we were near the front of the que to go through customs too.

So with our plane arriving at 3pm, we were pretty happy when we arrived at our hotel at around 5pm. 2 hours - not bad!

We went for a little wander up the street and found a few restaurants then went on to the car rental place to pick up our vehicle for the next 24 hours - a convertible Mustang (Dave was in car heaven!)

After a short drive around for Dave to practice driving on the opposite side of the road we returned to the hotel. We picked up some Taco Bell for dinner and spent the rest of the night at the hotel.

Today (Thursday 30 June) we went to Denny's for breakfast. Yummy pancakes with banana for me (and turkey bacon.... sooo good, why has this been hiding from us in Australia?!) a bacon and egg toasted sandwich for Dave.

We had a few awkward moments figuring out how we were supposed to tip, but we got it sorted and headed back to the hotel to collect the car, and we were off to find a phone shop so we could get a sim card for Dave's phone.

We came across a Target so we were able to have a wander and compare prices (and sizes) to Australian products. Dave got a sim card, and across the road we saw, in the middle of a parking lot, a fireworks stand!! We got talking to the security guard there and he gave us directions to the Pacific Coast highway.

We spent the afternoon driving around, up past Malibu and Zuma beach, I lost the lens cap for one of my camera lenses - no idea how, but we couldn't find it anywhere in the car - so weird!

The width of the sand on Santa Monica beach was crazy! None of this lying on the grass when the tide is in like at Torquay surf beach!

The Mustang had to be returned at 7pm. There were tears as I pried Dave's fingers from the steering wheel :)

Well, time for some sleep before our flight to Houston tomorrow!