LA arrival

We visited the west coast of the US in September and October 2011. This is the first part of a few blog entries describing what we did.


Los Angeles arrival

The decision to visit the US as a family came about with Jo's desire to visit Disneyland while the kids were at an age they would enjoy Disneyland the most. So with that suggestion, I was thinking 'while we're there' lets go and see a heap of other places and catch up with some friends we don't get to see too often. Next thing we knew, a rough 5 week plan was formed and we only had to decide when we would go. It seemed like 2012 would be the year, but the desire to go an get away was too strong, so we planned it for Sep 2011. We couldn't exactly afford to go, but where there's a will there a way, and we soon had flights booked to LA, car rental organised and some of the first few accommodation places booked.

V Australia's international service to LA was excellent. I would say slightly better than the Qantas experience I had the year before (with work to San Francisco). Service aside, I still struggled to get much sleep on the 14 hour flight. The kids and Jo don't have that same problem though and seemed to get a decent quota in.

I'd heard many stories about the pain of getting through LAX, but it didn't seem too bad to me, I've had worse experiences getting through Australian airports. We were soon through customs and met up with Kristen who had just flown in from Vancouver. She was joining us on the tail end of her North American holiday to be with us at Disneyland before flying home.

We headed over to Avis to pick up our hire car and loaded up. I couldn't help but watch the 737s in a continuous line fly overhead on their approach to LAX. I could have watched those planes for a lot longer until the rest of the gang told me to get in and start driving! On the way out of the Avis carpark I asked the security guy 'Which way to Disneyland?'. We got to Anaheim and our accommodation only stopping for directions once, but the driving on the right side of the road, left turns and staying in the middle of the freeway lanes was going to take some getting used to! I had 5 weeks of practice coming up though.

For the rest of the first day, we had a look at Downtown Disney shops, cleaned up a pepperoni 'metre' pizza and swam in the hotel pool.