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USA Part 3

L.A.

Now it was time to get back on the road and enjoy the empty highways and freeways before we hit the madness of Los Angeles. The journey was unadventurous until we got past "The Sierra Madre Mountains" and all of a sudden the freeway opened up and it resembled being in the "Wacky Races", there was traffic everywhere bumper to bumper, a far cry from the freedom of the previous open roads, give me back those boring roads; a journey that should have took about an hour ended up taking three.

We finally check-in at The Hilton Hotel in Anaheim, hot and tired and make our way up to our room for a well-earned rest before we see what's about. The hotel is ideally located for the Disneyland Resort but that's not something that interests us, we have different type of adventure to go on tomorrow, so it's dinner in the hotel restaurant followed by a few beers in the bar and off to bed.

We tuck into a nice big breakfast and head back up to our room to plan the route to the airport for our private flight over LA. Our flight is booked for 1 pm so it gives us plenty of time to find the airport, or so we think. Once again, we end up in the horrible LA traffic stuck, going nowhere fast, this is now getting serious we could miss our flight. Finally, the traffic moves and we are on our way, we might just make this, the signs for the airport appear and it's only a few miles away. When we get to the airfield we are told that it's the wrong one and the other airfield is at least one hour away. Panicking, we set off once again with a sketchy map and not very good directions, we head back on the freeway for about forty-five minutes and come off into an area which was signed "airport" but not anymore. I stop the car and jump out and ask some people outside their house, where the airport is, only to be spoken back in Spanish, later on I thought maybe this wasn't a good idea as I don't know where the hell I was. I jump back in sharpish and drive up the road for a few miles until I see a policeman giving a driver a ticket, again I jump out and head towards the policeman, to enquire about the airport, but he said wait until he's given the ticket before he will tell me. Five more minutes pass and the driver is sent on his way and the policeman acknowledges me, I ask him and he turns around and points and says "It's over there, go round this road and you'll see it", I thank him and try to drive off quickly.

He's right, a couple of minutes down the road and it's there, but now we are nearly two hours late and surely our chance has gone. We go into the office and explain our predicament, but the receptionist says everyone has gone home for the day, the tourist flights have finished for the day. Just as we are about to leave an instructor comes in and asks what's going on, she explains to him and he says he has as solution if we want it. He has a flight in ten minutes, teaching a civilian how to fly a small aircraft and if we want we can sit in the back and he'll show us all the sites while teaching his pupil, we agree and follow him to the plane. The pupil arrives, he looks like a gangster off "The Soprano's", he's a nice man, who we now learn is having his first ever flight, this could be interesting. It takes about twenty minutes to do all the pre-checks and paperwork and now it's time to fly, the instructor takes off and gets us airborne before handing over the reins. It's a very windy day and the plane is getting buffeted from all sides, and the pupil is doing his best to keep it steady, but I think most of the time the instructor is taking over. We go over the Pasadena Rose Bowl, fly past the Hollywood sign, skirt the outskirts of downtown LA, before we head back to the airfield. The runway appears before us and the instructor is telling the pupil what to do, but the wind isn't making it easy, we seem to landing very fast, before all of a sudden, the instructor takes the control and pulls the plane up before it slams into the ground. We are finally down and we taxi to our bay, still high on adrenaline we say thank you and good bye before we have to head back out onto that dreadful freeway.

It's now our last day and with our flight being in the small hours, we prepare our luggage for the trip back home so we are not rushing about in the early hours. Once packed we don't fancy travelling into downtown LA, seeing it takes hours to get there in the traffic; we decide to take it easy and go for a drive and see where it takes us, mostly around Anaheim. As we are driving, we see Angel Stadium which looks quite impressive and decide to stop and have a look. Outside there's signs advertising a tour, so without hesitation we decide to go on the 75-minute tour and see what this stadium is all about. The tour seems to be quite popular, there are at least another fifteen people with us who seem to be more knowledgeable than us. The tour is quite interesting and you get to see things the general public don't usually get to see, so it wasn't too bad.

After driving around a bit more we had a long lunch and then headed back to the hotel for a rest and to check if everything has been packed. In the evening we left the car and had a walk about, went to a couple of bars then had dinner and savoured our last evening in America. Seeing we had to be up at four in the morning to return the hire car and check in our bags at the airport, it was time to go to bed.

We checked out the hotel all bleary eyed and made our way to LAX in good time, it was a pleasure to drive on the freeways at that time of the morning. We returned the car with no problems at all and jumped aboard the courtesy bus for the short ride to departures and our last time on American soil for the time being.

Check in and security were a breeze and all we had to do now was try and kill two hours before our flight departed, oh well nothing for it, might as well try and catch up on a bit of sleep. After much tossing and turning on the uncomfortable seats, why can't every airport be like Singapore's, there wasn't a hope in hell of sleeping, so it was back to playing games on my phone, and a beer and sandwich.

Once on-board and up in the sky it was time to have a few beers to help me sleep, after a couple of beers, the stewardess said they were all out of booze, last time I fly with Virgin, only another ten hours to go, I'm going to need another holiday after this.