Vikki: After a final day in New York which saw us visiting the Intrepid Museum (Sea, Air and Space) and our last visit to Times Square, we took a fairly boring 6 hour plane ride, and have hit the west coast of America and are now back amongst the blue sky and golden sand beaches. Our first stop is Santa Monica, our base for the next 5 days while we do the obligatory LA site seeing and theme park visits.
We've picked up a car to make getting around easier, a good old American Chevrolet (sort of like a Rav) and being an automatic and with GPS so far driving has been pretty easy.
Today we headed down to the Santa Monica Pier, amazing to see many of the sites that you often see on TV, especially the pier and ferris wheel at the amusement park. We checked out Muscle Beach and saw a few men working out, though being a work day it seemed pretty quiet. Raj braved the cooler water and swam, while for us it was just a toe dipping and then a bit of sun worshipping on the beach. We finished the day with a drive up to Malibu, following the endless golden sands up the coast, and seeing some of the flash houses and cars.

Harley: On our last day in New York we visited the Intrepid Museum which is a sea, air and space museum. The museum is on the US "Intrepid", an old aircraft carrier. First we went inside the submarine "Growler". Inside we saw where the crew slept, showered and more rooms. The submarine could hold 88 people and spent 3 months away at sea at any one time. It could fire torpedoes and missiles at other submarines and ships. Next we saw the British Airways "Concorde". It could reach the speed of mach 2 which is 2450 kph!!!! Then we went to see the space shuttle "Enterprise". It did 5 test runs to test take off and landing. Finally we went on the top deck of the Intrepid where we saw to different types of aircrafts, like helicopters and loads of jet fighters. My favourite helicopter was the Bell AH-1 Cobra, and my favourite jet fighter was the A-12 BLACK BIRD. The Intrepid museum was really cool.
Yesterday we arrived in Los Angeles after a long 6 hour flight. We took a shuttle to a car hire place. There we hired an American white Chevrolet Captiva for 8 days.
Today we used the car to drive to Santa Monica beach and pier. We went to muscle beach, and we did some muscle working out on the bars and rings. I didn't go in the water because it was too cold. Next we went on the pier which had an amusement park and shops on it. From the wharf we spotted 1 stingray and 3 sand sharks. Lastly we drove to Malibu which is a rich beach town. We saw lots of flash cars there.