Day trip to LA

Bruce and Claire headed to San Francisco this morning, deciding to fly rather than drive as it was only an hour away and flights were quite reasonable! Stu and I, due to time and budgetary constraints, decided to give it a miss. We would have loved to go but we’ve got 6 months of adventuring to do and this early in the game we can’t be too gung-ho. That said, we’ve also decided that we’ll definitely come back to the US and we’ll do San Francisco then, so if we hadn’t made that decision we probably would have gone with Bruce and Claire.

We decided to do a day trip to LA today, taking the coast road for a nice scenic drive. It is so beautiful here! We stumbled across a farmer’s market on the way and bought some strawberries for the drive

And – CHECK OUT THIS STRAWBERRY!!!

These were absolute heaven! So sweet and juicy and would you believe they actually tasted like strawberry??!! I know that is a strange thing to say, but I have never eaten a strawberry that has really, truly tasted like a strawberry should taste!! I will never be able to eat Tassie strawberries again. Seriously – what we have at home is a bland, hard, tasteless, poor excuse for a strawberry. These were insane. We’re going back to get more, and I think I’m going to live on them and not share.

First stop – Venice Beach. So much atmosphere here, with lots of interesting people getting around. We could imagine that it would absolutely go off in Summer!

Definitely need to dedicate more time to exploring the area later, but for today a walk and lunch was enough and we set off to see Beverley Hills. Drove along Santa Monica Boulevard to Sunset Boulevard, and up in to the realms of the mega, mega wealthy. Wow. These people live in a different reality. Our little house in Claremont would be the garden shed in a place like this:

We (well, Stu, and I just agree...) have often commented on the cars around here – so many BMW’s, Mercs, Porsches, you name it we’ve been passed by it! There have been a few times we’ve been driving along surrounded by a million dollars worth of cars (which could be just 3 or 4 cars, in Australian values) which blows us away, however in Beverley Hills it was different. In Beverley Hills we were driving along next to ONE car worth over a million dollars (in Australia). ONE car!! $1,000,000!!! Wow. (As a side story, due to wrong-side-of-the-road stuff I almost got run over by a Porsche Carrera GT worth about $1.5 million. Hmmm... Perhaps I should have tried harder to get hit...??!!).

Need I say more?
Stu wouldn’t let me out – we just did a drive by.
Would have liked to have breakfast here – diamonds for breakfast!

But I would have settled for Jimmy Choo;
Or Dolce and Gabbana
Or Ralph Lauren
Or Louis Vuitton
Or Cartier...

Getting dark, time to head home. Bad timing and we had our first (and hopefully only) official Los Angeles traffic jam. Took us a good hour to drive about 5 miles (8kms) at most.

The light at the end of the tunnel was Joe’s Crab Shack in Long Beach, where we were headed for tea.

How can you not go to a place called ‘Joe’s Crab Shack’?? We were not disappointed. Started with the sampler plate, which had (JK /Rach/Bron don’t read this!!) delicious fried crab croquettes, fried calamari and some kind of evil cheesy crabby corn chip dipping sauce. Awesome.