Hi everyone!

So the travels begin and what an eventful start it was.

The Flight was surprisingly enjoyable for an 11 hour flight, the choice of films was good, the food wasn't bad and there was free wine (??!). We even made friends with a friendly new Zealand chap but didn't envy his 26 hour flight to Auckland!

Getting to the apartment was not as straight forward as you might think. Getting through customs took ages and the only thing that made this part slightly bearable was that we were stood right next to Mel B for a while.

The lady who we are staying with had told us to download an app in the airport and that would give us discount to a taxi fare right to her front door. This sounded great but the app didn't download, so 3 hours, a bus, metro and a taxi later, we arrived at her apartment only to find it was on the second floor and the buzzer didn't work! So after 10 minutes of back and forth ringing other neighbours, we finally got buzzed in and into her apartment.

Day 1 - Santa Monica

We woke up on day 1 in LA to amazing sunshine - I cannot believe its February here! We decided to head to Santa Monica for the day so hopped on the metro. We ended up getting on a bus that didn't take us the full way there but from looking at the bus map, which was the only map we had at this point, it didn't look too far to the coast. O we were so wrong! After over an hour of walking down Santa Monica boulevard, with various busses passing us by (which we adamently refused to get on as they didn't use our all day pass that we had bought that morning) we gave in only to find that a one way ticket straight to the pier was only $1!!

We had lunch and strawberry lemonades on the pier - which was way better than the only other one I've been to at Weston super mare! We then sunbathed on the beach for a while. The 2 things we had noticed about LA so far were:

1. It is absolutely huuuge it's got to be bigger than London??

2. There are a lot of weird people here.

Just to pick up on the second point quickly. Since leaving on our journey that morning we had seen a total of 7 completely crazy people. Our favourites were:

3rd place: woman with child screaming at innocent metro bus driver for ruining her life.

2nd place: the distressed man in Hollywood who smoked 2 joints (probably something stronger) and waited 15 minutes before having the courage to cross the road

1st place: the man who stumbled into Starbucks with his trousers by his ankles only to use the free serviettes to dry himself (bearing in mind it's 25 degrees with glorious sunshine outside) and then proceed to ask Ed to buy him a coffee.

We spent the rest of the day wandering around Santa Monica and walking up Main street. Lots of nice cafes/bars and shops here. This place was exactly how we'd imagined it - a city of long roads lined with palm trees on every street - we can definitely see why people love living here.

We ended up stumbling into bed at 8pm which I'm blaming on the jet lag and not a sign of us getting boring!!

Love Alex & Ed xxx