California road trip, part 1

All good things are worth waiting for and this is certainly true when speaking about our major blog post featuring our five day road trip in California. It has now finally been completed and is hereby presented to you, albeit in a couple of parts released with a few days’ interval so you won’t loose interest after the first three paragraphs when there’s more than half left. On the plus side though, we now have pictures available for you (the main reason why we delayed releasing these texts until we were in NZ was the difficulty of getting our pictures uploaded while on the Cook Islands). Enjoy them!

Before we start on the road trip though, just a few words about our current situation: we are now in Auckland, New Zealand and are staying at one of the YHA hostels in downtown, right next to the main street (Queen Street). We have fixed all urgent practical matters, i.e. we have NZ phone numbers, bank accounts, a postal address and have applied for our tax numbers, which we will get in 10 days. Our NZ phone numbers are:

Jungle Bunny B: +64 21 050 9323
Giigan: +64 21 051 0278

Please use these if you need to contact us by phone, as receiving calls and text messages is free for us, and we seldom have our Finnish SIM cards in our phones over here (just maybe once a week or so to check if any text messages have been sent to our Finnish numbers).

If you want to donate money to us for our travels, we can also arrange payment information for you to our new NZ bank accounts as well. That won’t be a problem at all. ;D

We’ll stay the next few days in Auckland, the rest even we don’t know yet! OK, let’s get on with the road trip:

After more than 13 hours in the air and 7 hours waiting at Heathrow for a connecting flight, we arrived at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) around 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday 26th August (2008). The bureaucracy at the airport was pretty painless; we avoided being caught by secondary inspection officers and proceeded to pick up our rental car with the convenient shuttle bus provided by the rental companies. Of course we didn’t notice that each rental company had their own shuttle bus and that we were on the wrong one, but it really didn’t matter much since the car rentals are all located pretty much at the same place. It felt good getting out of LAX, that airport sure is the worst we have ever visited. It feels like a prison - excuse us, a correction facility. (Sona seemed more homely, and definitely more colorful!)

At the rental company we were greeted by a happy surprise: apparently they were out of cars of the class we had booked and paid for in advance, so we got a complementary upgrade. In our case that meant we got to drive away with a Chrysler PT Cruiser (you’ll see a picture later). Not a bad deal even though it meant a slightly larger fuel consumption for our road trip.

Next stop was Hermosa Beach (about 15-20 km south of Santa Monica) where our accommodation - the Surf City Hostel - was located. At this point we want to point out to everyone who’s going to drive a car in LA at some time that a navigator is essential in this city and surroundings. At first we had thought about going the traditional way using an old-fashioned map, but thankfully we decided to buy a GPS receiver for JBB’s telephone and us it as a navigator while still in Finland. It saved us a lot of time and gray hair while driving around the maze that greater LA is.

And yes, you need a car in LA if you want to get somewhere. The commuter traffic is almost a yoke here if you’re used to the capital area in Finland.

With our navigator we quickly found the correct beach and street where the hostel was supposed to be. However, we had to search quite some time until we found the small door leading to the hostel next to two bars right on the pier avenue. Surf City Hostel certainly didn’t make much noise on the façade, but apparently it didn’t have to, since we were told they had no free beds when we arrived.

Of course we had bookings, but they were (not for the first time we heard) overbooked.

Well, this news didn’t freak us out and make us yell at the receptionists, no. Instead we took it all very calmly and were very understanding, which was much appreciated by the staff (they seemed to have had some bad experiences). Our sympathetic attitude and zen-like demeanor made them very helpful and friendly. The next day one of them even helped us find a good store selling hiking equipment and went as far as calling them to ask if they really offered what we were out to get.

As you might have guessed, we didn’t have to sleep on the street that first night. After some time they had managed to arrange one normal bed for us and prepared another one on the sofa in the TV-room. We had been traveling for over 24 hours at that point so it suited us fine; we just wanted to be able to lie down and rest our heads on pillows for a change. Giigan ended up sleeping in the bed and JBB on the sofa, which was very narrow and somewhat hard, but good enough. For half price for the both of us that first night it wasn’t such a bad deal.

The next morning the owner of the hostel was working at the reception and she cleared the whole mess up. She was French and had a terrific accent, almost impossible to understand :) She gave us a couple of nice beds in a mixed dorm ensuite room for the second night.

All in all, if you need budget accommodation in the LA area we can recommend Surf City Hostel. The location is superb right on the beach, it’s only a 15 min drive from LAX and the staff are nice. It’s not the cleanest spot in the universe, but it’s not the dirtiest either.


Our first whole day (Wed 27th Aug) in LA was mainly spent driving around the city. First we visited a couple of malls and then returned to the hostel and Hermosa Beach, where we walked to the end of the pier and enjoyed the sunshine and the view of the beach. Giigan had actually ran for about 45 minutes that morning on the beach when we woke up early and JBB was still asleep. There were quite a few people on the beach and we would have loved to join them, however, we had different plans. We sat down in our PT Cruiser again and drove to REI, which is a shop selling hiking equipment. From there we bought ourselves some quality sleeping bags for bargain prices. We were actually quite lucky in a way with our travel dates in the States, since the Labor Day (first Monday in Sep) sales had already started. So not only did we benefit from the propitious $ exchange rates, the bags were also on sale!


From there we went sight-seeing. We drove to Santa Monica, then to Beverly Hills and finally arrived in Hollywood, where we made the observation that the letters on the hilltop are actually much smaller in reality than on TV. But it was cool anyway.

In Hollywood we ate some fast food for lunch/dinner. The KFC drive-in could however not get our orders right. Giigan ordered a meal with chicken wings and a Pepsi, and JBB had the same. What we got was two of something called a Mash Bowl and no Pepsi. We were the only ones in the line, so we don’t know how they could have possibly got our orders so completely wrong. Anyway, we drove away with our mysterious bowls (which we later discovered containing some very salty fried chicken nuggets and potato mash) and decided to try out the food at El Pollo Loco’s. It was horrible! Stay away from that franchise!

At this time it was pretty close to sunset, so since Griffith Park was nearby we decided to drive there and watch the sunset. Griffith Observatory is the perfect spot for this. The observatory lies on a hilltop very close to the Hollywood letters. They are clearly visible from there. The sunset was very beautiful, but it would have been even more beautiful if you could see something else than a gray haze when you look out over LA and towards the ocean. The smog was really much worse than we thought it would be.


We also walked a short path on a trail starting at the observatory, but didn’t cross paths with any rattle snakes which a sign warned us of. That pretty much sums it up for our first day in California. LA is a really big place - in fact you have a hard time understanding it if you don’t visit the place - full of street after street with shops, more shops and houses. The drive back from Griffith Park to the hostel took an hour and it was all through densely built urban areas. The highlight of our drive back was the motorway (one of the many) at dark. It felt like we were in a car game like Need for Speed or something. 6 lanes, tail lights of lots of other cars in front of you, other motorways crossing on multiple bridges overhead, high speeds, plenty of curves… very thrilling!


Next morning at 9:15 a.m. we started driving north away from LA.

*End of part 1, keep you eyes open for the continuation very soon!*

P.S. Thanks to everybody who were present at the farewell party! We didn't get to go to Suomenlinna due to the weather, but had a nice time anyway. Here are a couple of pictures from the party.