The hire car we need to pick up is actually about 10km away and we get picked up from the airport by a bus that takes us to the location of the cars. Upon arrival, there are about 20 people waiting and in true customer service fashion, only 2 people servicing customers.
Tracy gets in line whilst the boys and Kayla lay on the couch and immediately fall asleep. I pace the floor getting more frustrated by the minute by the stupidity of the business in not having more staff behind the counter.
We finally get all the paperwork signed (which was in fact already pre-booked on line by Tracy the expert planner prior to arriving ) and get directed out the back door.
We were greeted by 3 people standing around doing almost nothing (instead of helping out the front where it would have been beneficial), and told to “select any car from the fence over there” with a finger pointing to a line of cars 100m away. If that’s the sort of help we are to get this holiday, there is going to be one angry Aussie.
We got a Dodge Caravan which is a mid sized SUV that was perfect for our bags and the 5 of us.
Now comes the fun part. Driving on the wrong side of LA roads with 2 million Californians that don’t ever get out of their cars and don’t seem to move anywhere fast. There are multiple freeways crossing each other more than a bowl of spaghetti with 6 lanes each way that reduce to 2 then back to 6 and sometimes 4. I am sure it is just to confuse the foreigners like us. I am at a loss as to why they have speed signs.... you are either stopped or doing 140km/hr, I did my best to keep up without veering into the next lane, sometimes doing 110km/hr yet most times doing less than 15km/hr (along with everyone else .... not just because I was crapping myself with people swerving through traffic like they were part of the crazy road structure.)
There is no reason for the slowing down other than there are more cars on the road than there are people in Australia. I got warned it was going to be crazy, but I hadn’t anticipated it to be this bad.
As we arrived in the early morning with 25 hours of no sleep and our AirBnB isn’t ready till 4pm, we decided to head West to Santa Monica Pier and check out the beach.
It was a slow day thanks to no sleep, but it was the only chance we were going to get to see this side of California
Finally we reached our limit and headed towards Santa Ana where we were staying.
We stayed away from the freeways as much as we could and checked out some of the coastal towns and back suburbs.
We found a supermarket to grab some basic supplies, then went to bed. It was only 7pm, but that was still an hour later than I ever imagined staying awake.
Tomorrow (somehow) is a full day at Disney