Day One: Driving Adventure

Today started early and continued well past 24hours. Finally we are lying down ready to sleep. We were on the road with our hire car around 8am. The car was a Kia Cerato and it wasn’t too difficult to drive, also with cruise control on the highway what more could you want. Well for one thing a petrol station at the airport. If you are coming in on the M5 and going to the International Airport you need to fill up at the 7/11 before you enter Sydney or perhaps don’t run as late as we were and drive around a bit near the airport.

Check in took a while as the plane was full and printing boarding passes took a long time. However the Virgin staff gave us Express Passes to get through Immigration and Customs which sped up the process immensely. We were able to make it to our gate on time.

Virgin Australia had a completely full plane and that must mean they are good right?? I thought overall their plane was nice. The food was excellent, had some very delicious chocolate cake. The on board entertainment was the only downside. I thought the range of movies and TV shows was lacking.

We arrived safely in Los Angeles yay!!

Our car hire was through Dollar and I am thinking we probably wont use them again. To collect your hire car no matter the company you have to get picked up from the terminal by their complimentary shuttle. That was easy. But then you have to wait at the Dollar office to collect your rental car. By wait I mean we were standing in line for about one and a half hours!! There were quite a few staff on but the process was so SLOW! Finally we got through the line then we went to a garage and chose our car from a variety of makes and models in the class we booked. We ended up with a Kia Elantra which was similar to the car we drove to Sydney with. It is an easy car to use which was good considering all the driving that was to come.

There is one HUGE highway from Los Angeles to San Diego with lots of lanes some of which exit and some of which go straight. The first part of the trip was speedy but we ended up in congested traffic for the second half. I am pretty sure I am never going to complain about Canberra roads again and this traffic jam lasted for ages!!

For lunch we ate at Rubios. A fish Taco chain. Laura and I had our very first fish tacos and Heng had a vege burrito. Thumbs up all around.

After a long car ride we finally made it to San Diego. We were very tired but didn’t want to sleep until later so we would sleep through the night. We had booked accommodation at the Best Western Seven Seas. It was in a nice location although nowhere near the sea. A clean comfortable and cheap room.

After having showers and freshening up (by this stage we had been awake for the good part of 24hours) we headed out to Walmart to get a phone to use in the US. Getting there was an experience in itself. Navigating the highway even with the GPS was difficult and a little hair-raising in the dark. Walmart was huge and fulfilled all our phone needs. Although we did almost get into an altercation with another customer because we took the last two cheap phones and he wanted one. But we had waited for ages to get these phones and there was no way we were giving one up!

This is what we looked like when they tried to fight us for our phones.

It was now getting late but we were hungry so we headed to Denny’s, a family style restaurant which is open late. The food was yummy and filling and the waitress was nice. She couldn’t quite believe we had never been to Denny’s before.

Thanks to our trusty GPS, which we are extremely glad we packed, we managed to get back to our hotel. Everyone was asleep very soon after that. It was a tiring first day but I am excited about all the things to come!