LA

The flight from Boston to LA was uneventful and not too bad when your in first class, 3 course meal, wine and freshly baked choc chip cookies, yum. Even driving around LA was ok once I got used to staying on the RHS of the road, though would have been completely lost without the GPS. We had a spare afternoon and on advice from Voula, headed to Santa Monica which is by the sea, about 20 min from LA.

It was a nice sunny day with temps in the low 100's and we were looking forward to dipping our feet in the water but when we got to the beach the view was non-existent due to the smog - see below, yes that is the beach taken from the Santa Monica Pier

I've never seen anything like it. Even if you don't believe in the Greenhouse effect and global warming, you've got to look at that and think what are we doing?

While walking back from the beach up to the shopping strip we came across these squirrel-like animals which were pretty cute and very tame, probably the highlight of our Santa Monica experience, which is kind of sad really