We had quite a journey to get down to LA from San Francisco, it involved an 8 hour greyhound trip, with a psycho driver!! We did however manage to sleep for Quite a large amount of the journey and also the scenery was very impressive, so it wasn't as bad as expected! From the Greyhound station we had a 90 minute bus journey to our Venice Beach Hostel, where we climbed up a mountain of stairs with our heavy cases, only to find out we were in the wrong place. Apparently Hotel is not quite the same as Hostel-who knew!! Anyway our room is really nice and we even have free internet in it-can't complain really! As it was a bit of a mammoth day we were all knackered so we grabbed some food before having a lovely long sleep.

On our first day in LA we headed to Santa Monica on recommendation from one of the guys working in the hostel. We spent a lot of the afternoon wandering along 3rd Street Promenade which was a really pretty pedestrianised shopping street. They had really cool dinosaur metal and tree sculptures that were also water fountains-we have pictures if the description paints a bit of a random site! It was very cool as the hostel supplied free rice and pasta so you could make dinner in the evenings for next to nothing-we really appreciated this!!

On tuesday we decided to head into Hollywood to do the whole touristy thing, this involved yet another mammoth bus journey. After changing buses once we got off at Sunset Boulevard, which incidentally is one hell of a long road. We know this as we walked all the way down it to see all the main sites of interest, such as, the Chateau Marmont (a really gorgeous hotel), The Viper Room-owned by Johnny Depp no less!-, Sunset Plaza and the Trocadera. As we were walking down the street we kept an eye out for any famous people, and Sam spotted Goldie Hawn driving past us-how exciting!!!! From Sunset we went to Hollywood Boulevard where we wandered along looking atall the Hollywood Stars set into the pavement. We saw the outside of Graumans Chinese Show, which was pretty awesome, unfortunately we didn't see the hand and foot prints as they were setting up for the premiere that evening of Kevin Costner's new film 'Mr. Brooks'. We wandered into the Kodak Theatre where everyone was queueing up to see the American Idol Final which was being filmed there live that evening. Whilst trying to find somewhere to eat we stumbled across the filming of Amy Winehouse's new music video; as she walks down the street we were walking right next to her, although we will probably be cut from it!!! On our way home on the bus we spotted Bruce Willis on the other side of the road in his car. It was so exciting!!! So it was a good day all round in terms of star-spotting!!!

On our final day in LA we headed back to Santa Monica as we really loved it there, here we saw yet another celeb, Raven from 'That's So Raven' on the Disney Channel-are you jealous!!! After wandering through the Farmer's Market where we got free peach samples, we headed on to the pier and then the beach. I bet your jealous now as this is where they filmed Baywatch (queue the music and the slow running-'Some people stand in the darkness.....'!!) We wandered along the beach stopping now and again until we had walked all the way to Venice Beach where we had a perusal in all the little shops.

We've had a chilled out evening packing for the move tomorrow to Las Vegas, we've got an early Greyhound so weren't too enthusiastic about that, and need an early night!!! More updates coming soon!!