Another photo from Hawaii here - we'll change them all once we get our photos on here!

Early start for us today...and a very long day travelling. We boarded our first bus at Moneterey at 7:15am...and arrived at our final destination at 9:30pm. Fun! Not a lot to say about the first few buses - we got to Salinas in time to catch our Greyhound bus to LA which took 8 hours. It was ok though, we were sat together and spent most of the day reading and listening to our ipods. I don't really mind bus journeys like that, and there were some pretty views of the California coast out of the window at some points.

The 'fun' started when we arrived at LA Greyhound station. On the way there we'd read in the guidebook that it was in a dodgy area of town but once you're inside it's fine. That's all well and good but we needed to leave the station in order to find our local bus! To ge to our hostel we had to get 2 buses, which sounded fine. We boarded the first bus and asked the driver to let us know when we got to the stop we needed. So we sat down and waited....and waited...as we drove down an endless street with no sign of the sea (we were staying at Hermosa Beach). Eventually we spotted the streets we needed and got off the bus. We needed to wait at the same stop and get another bus to the beach. We watied about half and hour, still no bus. By this time it was getting late and the sun was starting to set. We didn't really know what to do. There was a payphone across the road and I briefly contemplated going over and calling the hostel, but that side of the road didn't look too inviting! In the end I asked a few bus drivers while they were at our stop if this particular bus was still running and they assured me it would be here eventually! After about an hour the bus came - hurrah! We'd soon be at Hermosa Beach...or so we thought! This bus took another hour or so until we eventually saw the street our hostel was on. We got off the bus - at the wrong end of the street - but never mind, we were happy to be there at last (we needed number 26 and were walking past buildings with numbers above 500). It didn't take us long to reach our hostel and as we walked down the street we both thought how lovely it looked, lots of nice little bars, shops and restaurants, and our hostel was in a square of bars (above one particularly loud bar) and right on the beach, which we couldn't see at the time as it was pitch black by then!

When we eventually got into the hostel (there was no answer to the door bell so we had to wait for someone to come out and let us in) and checked in, we were led to our 6 bed dorm and our two top bunks (again!). The window was wide open and our room was directly above the very loud bar. Dave's reaction was 'right, we need to get back on Vegas time otherwise we'll never get any sleep!' If you can't beat 'em, join 'em! ...but maybe not tonight! We were exhausted after travelling for 14 hours hostel to hostel, so we went to a Mexican restaurant opposite the hostel, grabbed some beers from the very handy liquour store a few doors down and sat in the TV room chatting to some other people for a while. We got talking to an English couple called Lorna and Ross and found out that they had been as gripped by the Casey Anthony trial as much as we had (she got found not guilty - unbelievable!!) We went to bed, armed with earplugs, around midnight, and actually slept pretty well after an extremely tiring day of travelling!