The Road Trip comes to an end...only one more sleep to go

Good evening folks, from an internet cafe across the road from the Wilshire Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, California. I'm in the internet cafe adjacent to a Carl's Jr. hamburger restaurant, looking at the Wilshire Plaza Hotel, our resting place for this evening, out the window. Our road trip has come to an end, folks, as we have come full circle in our journey, and are back in Los Angeles for our final sleep before departing the United States of America.

But first, a recap. We left you last night reasonably early, with the birthday girl's maiden blog entry rounding out the night for you. Not so for us though. After Sarah had finished her part of the blog and I posted it, she quickly went onto Google to search for session times for the movie "The Proposal", a chick flick featuring Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. Not my first movie preference, I would like to add, but given that yesterday was Sarah's day, I begrudingly accepted her request!! As luck would have it, the AMC movie theatre was only a block down the road from our hotel in San Francisco, so we took the nice walk, hoping to catch the 9:00pm session so that we could have dinner (at a Denny's that we passed on the way) beforehand. Unfortunately (or was it fortunately??) the 9:00pm showing had already sold out, so we settled on the 8:00pm showing - given that we arrived at the theatre at about 7:25pm, it put dinner on the back-burner.

Going to the movies in America is very similar to doing the same in Australia - the only real difference is that Americans can, and do, bring hot food into the theatre, with the concession stand (or snack bar, Aussies) selling hot dogs, pizza, pretzels and all sorts of other no-good-for-you treats. We skipped the food part of it and settled in to watch the movie - a typical chick flick that I actually somewhat enjoyed, until the final credits started rolling and there was the now-obligatory after-movie action - although I didn't see it thanks to a young lady who started to leave when the credits started rolling, but stopped to watch the after-movie stuff - WHILST STANDING UP. A few people motioned to her to sit down, but she was having none of it, and stood all the way through the final action, ruining the experience for me a little bit. This was exacerbated when we walked out of the theatre and crossed the road at the traffic lights, with the "walk" indicator smiling brightly at us when we stepped off the sidewalk. It soon changed to a flashing red hand, with a countdown in seconds of how long you have to finish your crossing. We were about half-way through, with ten seconds left to cross, so we picked up the pace a little, only to have a bus start tooting at the car at the intersection waiting for us to cross, and gesticulating at us as if we were doing the wrong thing. This is what annoys me about this country - the United States is a wonderful place to visit, and the people in the majority are courteous and accommodating, but there's an element of the American society that are rude, pushy and downright ignorant. I suppose it's the same anywhere in the world, but it seems here as if it is almost done on purpose, as if the person in question feels it's their right to do whatever they want, whenever they want, and it can grate on the nerves, I tell you.

In the end, we gave dinner a miss last night, as neither of us were really hungry - the Eating Machine had blown a gasket for the night, and instead we returned to the Pickwick Hotel and went to bed, knowing that our final big driving day was ahead of us.

The alarm went off at 6:00am this morning, and anyone who knows Sarah knows of her abhorrence at waking before 9:00am on days when she doesn't have to work, so the alarm on my phone, playing "This Ain't A Scene" by Fallout Boy, was met with various moans and groans, and when I was still trying to wake her twenty minutes later, a fearful version of "The Look" was unleashed that had me scurrying to the shower!! I eventually raised Sarah - although she wasn't anywhere near fully awake, and her eating of eggs and bacon at breakfast looked very much like it was done on auto-pilot. We were finished with breakfast, packed up and checked out of the Pickwick Hotel just after 7:00am, with the GPS set to take us to Los Angeles via Highway 1 and the famed coastal route - a predicted nine hour journey, as opposed to a five-hour trip down I-5!!

But the drive was worth it - from five minutes after leaving downtown San Francisco when we turned onto Highway 1, until just after 2:00pm when Highway 1 merged with US Highway 101 and morphed into a freeway, I was completely at home on the road, with the Pacific Ocean as my companion. Having grown up with the ocean literally a stone's throw away, it makes me feel at ease when I can see the water, and we ran right alongside the Pacific today - in some stages feeling that a slight steering adjustment to the right would send us careering into the greenish-blue waters. On the other side, for the most part, were mountains - windy, bendy, challenging stretches of road not dissimilar to our trek through the Yosemite National Park and Sierra Nevada mountain range when driving to San Francisco on Monday, and the reason that the trip took longer than the run down the interstate. Sarah was snapping away happily with her camera for the journey down, and although I haven't seen the actual photos yet, if the scenery she was photographing was any indication, we should have another set of outstanding photos to show everyone on our return to Australia on the weekend.

By 3:00pm, we had finished with our coastal run, and were making our way towards the metropolis of Los Angeles, with the fact that we still had shopping bags full of stuff in the boot of our car with no big bag to bring them back to Australia. I had the bright idea of, rather than trawling around Los Angeles - where trends had indicated that the downtown shopping areas of large cities tend to be more of a department store scene - for instance, Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy's and Bloomingdale's as the majors (think Myer and David Jones, Aussies), whereas the suburban areas tended to feature Wal-Mart's and Target's - cheaper department stores - to stop at one of these suburban shopping malls to pick up a cheap suitcase to bring everything home in. My prayers were answered as we entered the city limits of Cammarillo, about 50 miles out of Los Angeles, and we passed a mall with a Target, right next to a freeway exit. We nicked into Target and picked out a duffle bag - there were suitcases in our price range, but they were sets of three, and I didn't want a family of suitcases invading our trip - and went and emptied out the car, packing everything as close as possible into the bags they will be travelling back to Australia in. It was a tight squeeze, even with the extra bag, and whilst there's still a little shuffling that has to be done, most everything is packed, and the car is clean (anyone who has seen my car back in Australia knows that it tends to maintain a "lived-in" look almost year-round, and the Nissan Altima wasn't all that different!!). We then drove the 50 miles into Los Angeles without too much complaint, although we entered after 5pm, therefore copping peak-hour traffic, but the pilot was much more confident in driving through Los Angeles this time around, and we made it to the Wilshire Plaza Hotel perfectly safe and sound.

The Wilshire Plaza Hotel is at 3515 Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles - remarkably, almost the identical address at which we emerged from the LA Metro system, having come from Los Angeles Airport on the FlyAway bus, back on Sunday May 31st in our first hours on American soil - the entrance to the subway station is right over the road from the hotel (in fact, it's right next to the internet cafe I am writing this from), and the Budget Rent-A-Car office that the Nissan Altima calls home is just two blocks away. All I have to do is find a petrol station, which I saw not far away as we drove in, and fill 'er up, and drop it at Budget in the morning. The road trip is officially over folks - our round-trip journey to LA has seen us cross almost 8000 miles of American roads, and has given us a lifetime of happy memories that we have enjoyed sharing with you on the way. It's almost ironic that the hotel we will stay in for our last sleep in America is right opposite the point where we first started to experience our American Dream - I'm normally not into symbolism, but I feel that this is still a pretty powerful symbol of our trip coming to an end.

But, it hasn't quite ended yet. We still have tomorrow, Thursday 25th June, in which to explore Los Angeles before boarding one of Qantas's finest for the trip back to Melbourne, with a five-and-a-half hour stop-over in Auckland, New Zealand. The plane doesn't leave LA tomorrow night until 11:45pm, which had the potential to leave us with a dilemma - check-out at the Wilshire Plaza is at 12:00pm, and we didn't fancy either being at LAX eleven hours before our flight, or dragging our suitcases with us as we checked out Hollywood. Luckily, the Wilshire Plaza offers a baggage storage facility, where we can leave our bags at the hotel after check-out, to be picked up later in the day. Which will be perfect - we plan on leaving our luggage at the hotel, checking out Hollywood for the day, returning to the hotel at around 6:00pm and making our way to LAX, most likely by taxi (costly, but more convenient than lugging our luggage through the LA nightly commute).

I'll try and post a quick something from LAX tomorrow night to let everyone know that we are at the airport awaiting our flight, which is scheduled to land at Melbourne Airport at 3:30pm on Saturday, June 27th (yep, after the 38 hour day for our first day in America, we skip completely over Friday June 26th on the way home).

And the question that you are undoubtedly asking yourself - why is he in an internet cafe instead of the hotel?? Simple, really, it comes down to economics!! The Wilshire Plaza wanted 49 cents a minute for internet access (which makes San Francisco's five bucks for twenty minutes look like a bargain), whereas I got a three-hour access card here at the internet cafe for ten bucks - the equivalent of twenty minutes of hotel time!! Whilst I won't get through three hours (although over an hour has gone already - we checked out some stuff here before dinner, including seeing the Red Sox win again, this time 6-4 over the Washington Nationals, with Big Papi hitting another home run. He had one on the season when I arrived in America - I go home with Papi having gone deep seven times in the last month - if he goes into another slump, then the Red Sox fans that read this blog need to get the organisation to fly me back over here - I'm Ortiz's lucky charm!!!), it still makes for a cost-effective session.

And so ends what will be our last on-the-road blog of the trip - as mentioned, I'll try and post from the airport tomorrow night, and will wrap things up when we are back on Australian soil (and for the non-Aussies, I'll post some of the pictures from the last couple of days so you don't miss out). It's time for me to cross the road and get some shut-eye - methinks sleep could come at a premium following tomorrow!!! Good night all, and to all a good night!!