Destination 12 - California and Nevada of the good ole USA! After 2 days wait/cancelled flights, move to another airline, lightening strike to the plane,12 and a hallf hours flight, plus 1.5 hours sat on the runway...........we finally landed in LA! Thank god for valium thats all I can say, what a journey it was to get here! Flying into LA was a constrast in itself, compared to the underpopulated, remote and rural NZ, it looked massive and went on for miles, where had all these people come from and where were the sheep?? It was so weird also to leave NZ at 8pm tuesday eve, fly for hours and then land at 1pm the same day, just a small 19 hours difference to our previous destination!! Picking up our cheap banger hire car proved fun in that on arrival they offered us an upgrade for fifty pounds so thanks to Trace and Si, (cheers for b'day pressie guys!) we were offered a CONVERTIBLE!!! Is this really back packing, we couldn't believe our luck! When the lady then said, 'just take your pick from anyone you want', we thought all our christmas's had come at once and oh, what a difficult decision we then had to choose the colour!!! Not good having a choice with 2 jet-lagged and 1 valium fuelled traveller!! Finally deep sea blue it was and then the fun, trying the roof off, but hey disaster then stuck, the bags wouldn't fit in!! Ads rammed, pushed, sweated but no the convertible had to go..... Tail between my legs I went back in to ask for our banger back at which the guy said, 'how about a grand cherokee jeep for your troubles?' So the jeep it was, after again another 'select which model and colour you want,' finally the biggest going was chosen and we set off, not realising how hard it would be to drive such a big 4x4 whilst navigating spaghetti junction in LA, a few million cars and being on the wrong side of the road in an automatic, aaah! It was cool though to be on the road on route to the glorious coastline of Santa Barbara, leaving the smog and hecticness of LA well behind! I was surprised at the scenery, almost instantly we were surrounded by dry arid hills and mountains this country is just HUGE! Santa Barbara was a brilliant place, clean, chilled, full of boutique shops with a real 'Beverly Hill's feel, I actually preferred it to Hollywood! Instantly both of us realised that this life would suit us down to the ground, if it wasn't for jet lag.... That night we spent wide awake until 6am, then slept most of the day and didn't surface to actually look around until about 4pm feeling awful! We chilled on the beach, soaked up the 25 degrees and absorbed the life that is so what you hear America is all about; guys on the beach playing ultimate frisbee, scantily dressed beach volleyball players, dads roller blading whilst pushing their sporty 3 wheel prams, women jogging dolled up to the 9's, friends speedwalking along the beach whilst reading books, cars the size of trucks parked all around with mammoth tyres and some crazy kids walking on tight ropes amongst the trees, not a bad life on all accounts! We both could have quite easily stayed for the week but after havng lost some days with flight delays realised that we needed to move on... Thursday morning, after dragging ourselves out of our jet lag hangover feel, we set on the road over the mountains of Los Padres National Forest that line Santa Barbara! Winding up the valley was pretty cool and reminded us so much of Laos in many ways. We passed gorgeous blue lakes and hardly saw a soul....... On stopping at a small town for a sandwich we then realised what the whole 'super size' means in America, a baguette on sale literally could have lasted me for lunch for 5 days, it was just MAD!! Even Ads looked at it and couldn't comprehend that people eat that much! Carrying on, (with the smallest sandwich we could buy which we only ate half of!) we headed further into the mountains and climbed higher, it was now about 32 degrees, 5194 ft (almost double that of Ben Nevis!) and the landscape was slowly becoming drier and more arid, it was hard to imagine that any greenery survived in this harsh desert mountain landscape. After a few hours we finally hit highway 5 and almost instantly the arid dry mountain landscape turned completely flat, just weird! Now it was 36 degrees and very hot! On driving amongst the many trucks, we passed a typical american freight train.......this consisted of a mere 85 carriages and was well over 1km long, we were astounded! Is there anything in the US that is not supersized??! On reaching Visalia, our destination for the night on route to Kings Canyon, we checked into our motel, amused ourselves at an american couple argueing loudly in public outside our room (apparently she hadn't 'mounted' some other bloke!) then treated ourselves to an italian which consisted of enough bread and salad for 5,000, a starter and huge main for all of about 15 pounds, bargain!! If only hotels were still as cheap as they used to be also....... Retiring to bed we listened to the blasting drum 'n' bass / jungle / hardcore / ambient dub of 'hey man I'm cool in my truck' tunes outside praying that tonight would see us finally getting some sleep.....