Angels 😇 and Sinners 😈

Our 9 hour flight from Tokyo to LA is pretty smooth. It’s on the no-frills airline ZipAir, which I don’t think would be allowed to run in Europe as even water isn’t provided free on this long haul flight. Thankfully, we’re prepared and have ample food, drink and entertainment to get us through. We cross the date line and arrive in LA before we left Tokyo. Weird. We somehow speed through immigration and customs in the USA for the first time ever, they don’t even ask to see the panicked refundable exit train ticket I’ve booked in line as our pretend proof of exit. No declaration forms to confess to the food we’re bringing in once more. And so we’re in. They clearly haven’t been reading the blog!

A quick bus ride later, and we’re down in Redondo Beach where my old school-friend, her husband, parents, and two dogs welcome us to stay for a couple of nights.

They have a gorgeous, huge, house, and we’re so grateful to be able to stay and be able to catch up after a good many years. They also get to meet James and we can celebrate our engagement together. Despite our best intentions to explore the area on arrival, we crash out for a four hour sleep, we’ve been awake 36 hours by this point. Thankfully, this co-incides with Katie and her husband (Pete) finishing work, so somewhat more refreshed, we go out for a tour of the area, with the expansive beach and rolling sea just a few minutes walk away. Gorgeous. We catch up over dinner and a drink. It’s really lovely to be able to live a bit of a normal life, after not just back-packing for so long, but the chaos of WWOOFing. Just having a beer with friends really makes it feel like home.

Our next day, Katie and Pete generously spend their national holiday ferrying us around the tourist spots. You really can’t get anywhere in LA without a car, certainly not anywhere fast, and so it’s thanks to them we’re able to see as much as we did in the one day we have in LA. We stop off at the Chinese Theatre, checking out the hand and feet prints, that have somehow lasted since the 1920s.

The walk of fame with various stars to spot. Katie explains that it’s actually the celebrities that pay to have a star. You have to be accepted of course, you can’t just be anyone, but still, you’ve got to look at those stars with some irony that they’re the ones that paid to honour themselves on the street.

Next up is the Hollywood sign. Here’s Katie and I in the same spot in 2017…

And now!

Then back to their old stomping ground of Santa Monica pier. It’s still as bustling as ever (and full of certain ‘characters’ too). It really is lovely to be by the sea again, looking out towards the islands where we’ve just spent the last few months. The beaches here are so wide and vast, with kids splashing and playing in the cold waters, the lifeguard towers dotted through just like in the TV shows.

We explore a British store and laugh at all the things we don’t think we’ve ever seen in Britain, and all the things we forgot we missed. We grab another drink at the British themed pub next door, before heading back to theirs via the tiny, rollercoaster roads of Little Venice.

And that’s our lot in LA! A whirlwind tour and catch-up, which we couldn’t have done or enjoyed as we did without the generosity of Katie and Pete. It really was hard to load up the backpack, say goodbye, and get back on the road. But our grand tour is coming to an end, and there’s not much time to waste!

Escape from LA

Leaving the blissful suburbs of Redondo Beach, we need to head to the University near downtown to get out bus to Las Vegas. This means getting on the wonders of the LA public transit system. A journey that might take half an hour in the car, will take us over an hour on buses. Now, we’ve spent a good amount of time figuring out which bus to get, and reading up about why we shouldn’t take the Greyhound. So you can imagine our glee when I get a message that our bus has been cancelled. I then get another message (whilst we’re trying to figure out what we do instead) to say we’ve been rescheduled onto another bus, a Greyhound bus, from Downtown LA no less. We’d been reassured by Pete that the Greyhound isn’t so bad, as long as you can sit together, and near the front of the bus so you can be first to grab your bags. Of course now the money we paid to reserve our seats on our original bus belongs to Flixbus forever. The inevitable anxiety is only heightened by our arrival to the the dead quiet of downtown LA, except for the ramblings and yellings of the troubled and unwell homeless who are the only other people out on the streets. Compared to Japan, the homelessness, mental illness, drug use, poverty, and perceived lack of safety here is serious culture shock, and we both briefly consider just scrapping the USA plan entirely. Thankfully, we can pay to reserve two seats together again (effectively spending twice as much to do so), and I’m grateful we have the money to make these choices. This turns out to be a serious right call as all chaos ensues when those without reserved seats and multiple children try to sit together. Our driver takes it all on the chin and jokes with us and keeps spirits up, “y’all gonna be cousins afta this trip, doncha worry, I told y’all, y’all gonna be familee, now I neva much liked musical chairs when I was a keed, so I done wanna be playin it naw“. He makes the journey smooth and is a real example of how to take bad situations with comedy, instead of what could have very easily turned into a brawl.

Eventually, we do make it to Vegas, sitting next to each other, we even manage to get our bags without issue. Now it’s time to get more public transport because the Greyhound has dropped us an hour away, when our original destination was just to walk it. Insert more characters on the next bus, and we finally make it to our original destination of the Plaza Hotel, up on Fremont Street, the older part of town.

Our room, is HUGE. I mean, four times a Japanese apartment. The bathroom alone is probably the size of one! We dump our bags and head out to experience the bright lights of Vegas for the first time.

Everything is over-the-top. The lights. The colours. The noise. The entertainers. The drinks. The people, oh the people. I always thought that the characters in USA shows were just caricatures, but they’re not. They’re actually like that, a full melting pot of all your typical US of A characters, swigging giant slushy drinks, singing and dancing along to one of the many stage acts, laughing, chatting, having the times of their lives in Viva Las Vegas. Us, like squirrel monkeys, watch with wide-eyes trying to take it all in. Japan afterall is also completely bonkers. But then the people are all reserved and quiet and subdued. Whereas here, the people match the situation. And as a quiet introvert, I very much enjoy our spot overlooking one of the stages, watching the melting pot yell along to the tribute act below us.

Enterprising Situations

The next day is Friday, which means that all the hotels triple in price, and it’s time for us to move out quickly. We’ll come back when it’s back to cheap rates. Little do we know that the next six hours will cause us to wonder once more if we shouldn’t just fly home or somewhere else. It goes like this…

• Show up to Enterprise 1, bags packed, and ready to start our road trip
• Get told the car isn’t ready and come back in half an hour.
• Walk back along to where we started, laden with bags, in 40° heat, to get an over-priced ABC wrap for breakfast.
• Time to start over.
• Present documents.
• Get told that because we don’t have a credit card, we need to provide a plane ticket out of the USA.
• We have a train ticket AND a cruise ticket leaving the USA, and a plane leaving Canada, but no plane leaving the USA.
• Get told it doesn’t matter, it has to be a plane ticket. Policy.
• Decide to take the hit of putting the charge on my overly expensive for foreign transactions credit card (our back-up plan).
• Realise I didn’t actually bring it.
• Discuss between us infront of the staff member buying a refundable flight.
• Get told the flight has to have been booked 24 hours in advance.
• Contemplate finding somewhere cheap to stay in Vegas and do this all again tomorrow morning after the 24 hours.
• Look into other rentals and try and figure out their policies and if they’re as stupid.
• Send James off to sneakily find out from Budget whilst I hang back to book a flight in secret if so.
• Same same.
• Book two refundable flights out of Seattle.
• Doctor the booking so you can’t see when I booked it. Head to Budget.
• Lady there says they don’t take debit card payments, but she can try.
• She tries three times, but it’s declined. Whether it’s because it’s a debit card, or because they don’t have chip and pin in this backwards country, we’ll never know.
• James has the sneaky idea to try a different Enterprise, where they haven’t heard our conversation about booking a refundable flight.
• Walk and wait for 30 minutes in the now >40° heat for a bus.
• Get told off for trying to enter the bus as the door opened, rather than wait to be invited in.
• Get back on the bus 1 second later after the invite (eyeroll).
• Run across a six-lane highway because there’s literally no other way to cross.
• Arrive to Enterprise near the airport. Wait.
• Get attended to and told we’re at the wrong Enterprise. This one is geographically nearer the airport, but is actually not the airport one. She can’t match the price.
• Look into getting another bus, and give in and order an Uber.
• Get into a white Tesla with white leather seats. Bold choice!
• Make it to Enterprise airport, big edition.
• Somehow get into the Premium queue.
• Get seen straight away, with all our fake documents ready to present and our bank card back-up ideas ready… “All good guys, just head out back and get your car”
• No questions. No debates. No pleading. No begging. No fake documents needed. Chip and pin machine instead of just the magnetic swipe. Our man is a cheery dude who has no idea how happy he has made us. We try to contain our excitement so he doesn’t realise we’re technically not meant to be renting a car.
• Head round the back where another cheery lady greets us and isn’t sure she has a car of the lower calibre we reserved… “how about that one? Free upgrade“. As she points to a BMW.
• It’s an absolute beauty, but bigger than anything I’ve ever driven. Although all of the options here are big or bigger. We jump in, and get comfortable. Have we done it? Have we made it out of Vegas???? One more check-point.
• Drive to the barrier attendant, hand over the licence, “have a great trip y’all“.
• We’re off!!!!!

Satnav immediately sends us into a tour of a carpark, but we’re free. We’re actually off. From complete desperation, to being in a fancy car on our way to the canyons. Our nerves shot, we can finally breathe. I guess it’s time for the road trip!

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Adventure – getting driven around LA by Katie and Pete, wandering Fremont Street in Las Vegas after an incredibly long and stressful day

Excitement – spending time with Katie and Pete, catching up, and feeling like normal people again! Meeting Murphy and Jack (Katie, Pete and her parents’ doggos), being able to communicate in English again, making it through immigration and customs without any issues

Trauma – the unhoused situation, trying to leave LA, trying to leave Vegas, Chuckie street ‘performer’