Travels around the world – LA and San Francisco

For the American leg of the world travels we had got ourselves a Delta Pass. This was a ticket that gave us a months worth of unlimited travel around the USA on Delta Airlines on a stand by basis. Basically, if there were spare seats we could travel but we were usually the last to board in case a paying customer turned up and wanted to get on the plane. We started off being quite lucky with our journeys. When my travel buddy Adam had booked his ticket for the American trip he’d arranged the fly in to Los Angeles whereas I had already arranged to land in San Francisco. Luckily Adam had landed a few hours before me and by the time I arrived in San Francisco he had already used his ticket once to meet me at the gate. We made a reservation in a hostel and made our way over to our accommodation for the evening. The first impressions of SF were not great but it was dark and we didn’t really know where we were going but we arrived and checked in. Next day was the start of a new adventure. Pier 39, San Francisco Bay. The boat trips from here book up days in advance so we were not able to get a tour of Alcatraz, we had to make do with the trip that just goes over to “The Rock” and then comes back to the jetty. It was still a good trip. It starts by taking you under the Golden gate bridge before making its way over to the old prison. When you are making your journey over it is easy to see why nobody, allegedly, has ever escaped. The whole tour had an audio commentary with interesting viewpoints pointed out and interviews with experts on Alcatraz itself. Although I didn’t get the chance to stand on the island or see inside the prison cells itself I am happy that I did the tour. After the boat trip we went out to explore some of the other sights, we saw America’s crookedest street and had to walk down it just to say we’d done it and that was our whistle stop tour of SF. We were there less than 24 hours before heading back to the airport for our next flight. Next stop was Los Angeles, this turned out to be another quick trip around the city. As we had no place to stay we decided to put our bags in a locker and get the bus into the City. Where is the first place that 2 scruffy backpackers head for when they get to LA? It had to be Rodeo Drive. One of the first things that struck us about LA was that the signs on the buses are in English and Spanish, this was the first time we had seen this, it was ever weirder to notice that the Spanish language was the first entry with English underneath. Rodeo Drive is an experience, all of the shops look so clean and bright and we really did feel like we didn’t belong there and this was before we even attempted to go inside any of them. In fact, there were quite a few that we would not have been able to enter even if we wanted to. The concept of a shop opening for appointments only is totally alien to me. After a while we decided to move on and rather than head towards the city itself we decided to find the beach and see another part of the LA culture that we had heard all about. For this we made our way to Venice. We managed to find out where the bus went from and walked for ages to get to the bus stop and rested against a wall until the bus arrived. I just happened to look over the wall and found that right next to a busy street there was an amazing beach. It turns out that we had inadvertently stumbled upon Santa Monica. Venice Beach actually offers much more than I expected. While I was not surprised to see the weight training on the beach the sheer amount of buskers was not expected. The first thing I heard was a band playing a Stevie Wonder song. I could hear the saxophone and the bass guitar of the instrumental part and I was trying to find where the music was coming from. It turned out that there was one person playing the whole thing, he was playing the sax in the normal way but the Bass was on the floor and he was playing the bass line with his feet. All in all there was just too much to take in, people on roller skates with snakes around their necks, tattoos being done outside and a guy who would tell you a joke if you gave him a dollar. I could quite easily have stayed in this part of LA but we needed to get back to the Airport to collect our bags and move on to the next section of the adventure.