…well according to the logic of Andrex! Here’s their latest ad on youtube: here. On it, it says:

“Andrex is soft, strong, and unbeatably long!”
Then, at the bottom, is the small print: “Excluding longer lasting products”.

Huh? Excuse me? So what you’re saying is… that Andrex is unbeatably long, when you exclude products that last longer. Riiiiiiiiiight (in a Dr. Evil voice). By that logic, I’m the world’s greatest lover, excluding all those that are greater lovers than me.

Congratulations Andrex, you’ve made my list of products I won’t by out of principle.

I see I’m not the only one who this bothers: One Two

Walkers Crisps have an interesting promotion on…

Win £10 every day it rains.

You go to www.walkers.co.uk, choose where in the UK you think it will rain (on whatever day it is two days from today), and enter a code off a pack of crisps.

Well, having just bought a Cheese & Onion pack of crisps, I thought I’d give it a go! Come on, it rains so much here, it’s easy money!

I liked the entry because there was no ridiculously long entry form. I just entered my email address, created a password, didn’t click the “you can send me spam” box, and boom! If it rains between 8am and midday on Saturday just east of Stirling in Scotland, I win £10!

I chose Stirling because according to BBC Weather, that’s the only place on Saturday where they’re expecting rain. Although you can see where everybody else has guessed, and it seems that people are guessing around major cities – perhaps they’re picking squares based on where they live, or where they have attachments… suckers!

Ok, so you had to choose a 4hr window as well as a place, and you’re only allowed one entry per day, so you’re not going to get rich off it. But it was a bit of fun for this afternoon.

That £10 is not going to seem like much after I win £112,000,000 on the Euromillions on Friday. But it all adds up. Especially considering the crisps only cost me 40p.

EDIT 5 November: It didn’t win on the particular day I chose here, but I entered the competition three more times after this post and won £10 on two of those days.

Haven’t updated the blog for a while, and so I thought I’d have a good old whinge… after all, that’s why I created the blog in the first place, isn’t it? Well that, and to post photos of my travels!

Went out for a run last night, the first in a while. I thought I’d go around along the south side of the river, through the Greenwich foot tunnel and back around through Canary Wharf. But I got to the Greenwich foot tunnel, and it was all boarded up with a sign saying that it now closes at 9pm nightly. Rude.

So I thought I’d run downstream (or is it upstream?) to the Woolwich foot tunnel, some 35 minutes further away from my house. “Surely,” I thought, “Greenwich can’t be so contemptible as to close both foot tunnels at the same time”. But when I got there… it was boarded up as well!

There was a sign saying “due to health and safety concerns, this tunnel is closed until further notice”. Yup – nice one – health and safety is a good excuse to do pretty much whatever you want. Maybe someone slipped on a banana peel.

The sign went on to say “please use the nearby free ferry in the meantime”. Surprise surprise… the ferry was also closed.

So, I’d just like to say… London Borough of Greenwich, you’re an embarrassment to London. And as a not entirely unrelated side-note, your borough has far too many slugs. You should do something about that.

I’ve emailed Greenwich Council about this, let’s see if they reply.

EDIT 5 November: I got a reply shortly after saying “we’ve forwarded your message to the appropriate department”, but nothing more after that.

I thought after my last post on T-Mobile I should write something nice today! It’s Friday so it’s not hard to be in a good mood!

I was super bored last night, and after looking on the net for something to occupy myself I found Sketch Swap… basically you draw on a (virtual) whiteboard, and once you’ve finished, it draws on that whiteboard a picture that someone else drew.

So… I drew this:

and I got this drawn for me on the screen:

I drew this:

and got this:

I drew this:

and got this:

I drew this:

and got this:

Apparently they’re approved behind the scenes so you know you won’t get shown something horrible. Although who knows if that’s still happening, this site’s been around a few years it seems and maybe the authors are no longer approving pictures. It’s a bit of a shame to think that my masterpieces (come on, they are, aren’t they?) are going nowhere and will be seen by nobody.

Go on, give it a go!

PS. apparently K.L.B. in Connecticut loves pies, or at least she did on Feb 11 2006. Who doesn’t
PPS. it’s cooler on the site because it actually draws it the way the person originally drew it… which you can’t see here on my blog.

When I got back from my holiday last month, I got myself a new phone as I thought it was about time that I had a phone with internet on it. I joined T-Mobile because they had the best deal.

But now they won’t stop texting me with SPAM and JUNK!!! Every couple of days, I get a text telling me about some new feature, thing I don’t need or offer I don’t want.

So yesterday I called customer services (on a premium rate number of course) and was told that by texting STOP to 49011, I would be removed from all marketing. So I did.

Since then I’ve had more texts than ever.

Yesterday, 13:22 from “T-Mobile”: T-Mobile is really pleased to have helped you today, for 24 hour access to manage your account log in www.t-mobile.co.uk/somegoddamnstupidlink. Thankyou, Stephen PS78

Yesterday, 13:23 from “49011″: Thank you, you will be removed from the T-Mobile Marketing mail list within 14 days. Pelase note this does not stop marketing messages from other companies.

Yesterday, 13:23 from “49011″: Thank you your request has been received. Please allow up to 14 days for changes to take affect.

Today, 13:26 from “T-Mobile”: Thank you for contacting T-Mobile! We’ll text you shortly for some feedback about your experience with us (All texts are free)

Today, 13:28 from “303510″: Q1 of 4: Overall, how satisfied were you with your call experience? [followed by a list of multichoice]

T-Mobile… listen… stop it! Stop it stop it stop it stop it stop it! STOP IT! What part of “I don’t want any more texts from you” don’t you understand??? One more text and I will be making a formal complaint.

By the way, I shouldn’t have to wait 14 days. Their developer needs to simply run the following SQL query to remove me from their database:

DELETE FROM numbers_to_annoy_incessantly_for_the_rest_of_their_life WHERE name = “Matthew Coolness McGee”.

That’s not difficult, is it? If that takes 14 days, then they have a severly defective index in their database schema.

Can I also take this time to say that T-Mobile are shit. Don’t use them. 70% of the time when I try to use anything that requires internet on my phone, I’m hit with “Connection failed”, “No network available”, or that sort of gubbins. This is despite being in an office building 8 floors up with full advertised phone reception. Plus, 30% of texts I send come back with “unable to send message”, and then I find out from my friends that they got my messages twice. That turns out to be costly for me when I start texting people in New Zealand.

Grr T-Mobile. You suck. I was with O2 for 3 years and never had a problem with them. Wish I’d paid an extra fiver a month and stayed with them.

So, here I am, 81 days later, where has all the time gone. Seems like just yesterday I was complaining about the volcanic ash disruption back in April, and being scared out of my mind as I flew into Costa Rica. I’m happy and sad about going back to work – happy that I have a job to go back to, sad that my holiday can’t continue. I thought that by this time I would be super excited about going back to work. If I claimed that were true, I’d be lying.

Hannah and I drove our rental car to the airport to check-in early, because I wanted to get a window seat (read yesterday’s entry if you haven’t already). My flight was at 7:30pm and we got to the airport at about lunchtime.

Sadly, the check-in lady couldn’t get me a window seat, but she was able to get me an aisle seat in the very first row of Economy class, which meant that I had extra legroom but without the disturbance of being by the toilets or galley. I was pretty happy with that. The check-in lady was very sympathetic to my situation and tried to find out why my flight had been cancelled from before, but she wasn’t able to find out anything. She said something about “one of your original flights was changed and you went two days later”, but that wasn’t true.

Then we went and checked Hannah in for her 9:30pm flight with a different airline (the volcanic ash disruption from April meant we couldn’t fly together without paying LOTS of money). Wow, Continental Airlines have a MUCH easier and friendlier check-in process than American Airlines.

So now we had quite a few hours to kill until our flight and we still had our rental car. We went for a drive around some of LA’s beaches. We saw Manhattan Beach which looked like a very beautiful place, it had a main road that ran parallel and near to the beach, but it was up a hill from the beach, and each side street went directly downhill to the water with lots of nice houses on either side.

Then we saw a big hill in the distance, and we drove up there to see what the view was like. It was beautiful. And the houses were massive and looked VERY expensive.

All this driving used up a lot of time, and so we drove back to the airport, returned the rental car and sat in LAX airport for a few hours. When it came time for our flight, I said goodbye to Hannah (we departed from different terminals) and we went our separate ways. It was a bit sad, because even though we’d see each other again in a few days, we both had such a great time in America and it was very sad to leave it.

My flight back to London was nice, it was direct (unlike Hannah’s which stopped in Newark). The lady sitting next to me in the window seat looked like a Swedish supermodel, and she acted like it too, she had no idea how to work any of the video equipment or in-flight entertainment and I had to show her how to do everything. She said “I’m used to flying British Airways, this is such a step down for me”. It was funny.

So that’s the end of my 3 month (well, 81 day) trip to South America, the USA and New Zealand. I hope I get the chance to do something like this again one day. But it cost a lot of money. Seeing my bank balance when I got back to London was depressing. But then I thought again how lucky I was to be going straight back into a job.

I think a lot about the people I met on my trip, and wonder where they are now. It was actually quite hard because I made some really good friends, but then you have to leave them again almost as quick as you made them as you move on to other destinations. But I still feel like my life is a lot richer for the experience.

At 1am on the morning of 12 July, I went online to double check my flight time for the next day. I logged onto the American Airlines website, and to my horror, my itinerary had the word CANCELLED next to it.

Of course, I immediately went into panic mode. My flight was in just over 36 hours, and I had been kicked off it for some reason. Very rude, I thought, since I had had no notification at all via email, or phone, or nothing that my itinerary had been cancelled.

So, I had to make an extremely expensive call to American Airlines’ premium-rate London-based 0844 number – I knew this was going to be very expensive to call from the USA, but I had no choice. The guy on the phone was not able to tell me why my itinerary was cancelled, but thankfully there was space on the flight for me to be put back on. Normally I wouldn’t have minded spending a bit longer in LA, but I started my own company a few weeks back and needed to be back in London to sign the paperwork and do some boring admin stuff.

However, there were only three seats left on the plane, and they were all in the middle of groups of five seats. I’d lost the very excellent window seat that I’d booked three months prior. The guy on the phone said that if I checked in early, the check-in agent might be able to give me one of the few window seats that were in the exit rows, that they were not allowed to give out on the phone. Oh well, at least I had a seat I guess. Despite this, I will be writing one hell of a complaint letter when I’m back in London to get compensation, or at least, to get back whatever the horrendous cost of the phone call will be.

So after lying in bed for a while at 1:30am, not being able to sleep, I eventually did get a few hours’ sleep, and we woke up at 8:30 because we were going to Knott’s Berry Farm today. For those that don’t know, it’s a theme park with scarier rides than Disneyland. We decided to go after seeing on the internet that you could get $20 off if you went to any Southern California Subway store, making the day only USD$34.99, very cheap we thought, compared to Disneylands USD$90-something.

We went off to the nearest Subway in Garden Grove (via sat-nav) and after waiting in line for 5 minutes they said they’d never heard of any discount scheme to Knott’s Berry Farm. What a surprise, we thought. Just because we were suckers for punishment, we thought we’d try another Subway about 1 mile away. To our surprise, the guy behind the counter there handed us a big stack of discount vouchers. Hooray! So we bought Subway off him. He was very cool, shame the egg and cheese in the sub tasted like plastic. Not to worry, we felt like our Subway was almost free since we got $20 off each to the theme park.

When we got to the theme park, we noticed everything was a bit less refined than Disneyland. The queueing was a bit more chaotic (although the queues were MUCH shorter), they didn’t seem to mind if one person went by themselves on a four-person ride, there were no waiting times posted, and everything was just a little more “falling apart”. But we had an excellent time, and Hannah and I both said that it was overall much better value for money than Disneyland. And we couldn’t believe how short the lines were! I’m sure we didn’t wait longer than 10 minutes for anything, and sometimes you could get off one ride, go straight back into the line and get straight back on!

Hannah wouldn’t go on the Supreme Scream – the equivalent of the Giant Drop in Dreamworld, where you go up a very tall pole, sit up there for 10 seconds or so and then freefall back to the ground. Hannah said she would do it if it was the same size as the one at Rainbow’s End or Thorpe Park, turns out though that it was quite a bit higher. If you’re interested (I know I was) – here’s how far you drop on each ride.

Thorpe Park’s Detonator (England) – 30 metres
Rainbow’s End’s Fearfall (New Zealand) – 54 metres
Knott’s Berry Farm’s Supreme Scream (California) – 77 metres
Dreamworld’s Giant Drop (Australia) – 119 metres (apparently the tallest ride in the world)

The Supreme Scream was scary because although not as high as the Giant Drop, the surrounding landscape was completely flat and you could see for miles and miles (despite all LA’s pollution). The line for this ride was never more than 3 or 4 minutes.

I didn’t know that Knott’s Berry Farm was “Peanuts-based”, and had Snoopy and Charlie Brown as well as all the other Peanuts characters there. I thought that was awesome. While we were there we saw a presentation called “Snoopy On Ice” which was people dressed up as the characters doing ice-skating, as well as other professional ice-skaters.

The scariest ride was the “Ghost Rider” (in the photo above), which was the oldest roller coaster in the world (I think it was the first roller coaster in the world). The reason it was the scariest was that it was made of wood and everything was held together by masses of wooden beams. It was scary because we could not believe that the carriages stayed on the tracks. I even bought the photo taken by the camera along the ride. We look terrified. I hope that I can find a scanner so I can put the photo on here.

EDIT: I must have made all that up, looking on wikipedia shows me that the GhostRider opened in 1998. Eek. They must have built it all rickety on purpose.

After a great day out, it was back to Econolodge, and time for the last sleep of my holiday before flying back to London.

There’s heaps more photos in the same facebook album as the previous post.

Wed 7 Jul

We got up just before breakfast finished in the Good Nite Inn in Buena Park, and encountered the worst breakfast in the history of breakfasts – all there was was donuts which were stale, and coffee which was empty. No cereal or milk or anything else like that. Yuck! We ended up going to McDonalds across the road for breakfast instead.

After a detour of a couple of hours at a mall full of outlet stores where I bought two shirts, a new wallet and a belt, we were off on our four and a half hour drive to Las Vegas. The drive was quite uneventful, no traffic or anything.

We checked into Ballys Hotel and Casino, which didn’t sound very flash, but it was! It’s joined to the Paris Hotel and Casino, which has a big replica of the Eiffel Tower out the front, and is on the corner diagonally opposite Caesar’s Palace (seen on The Hangover and on Friends) and directly across from the Bellagio where they have amazing water fountain displays. On the other corner is the more quaint “Bill’s Gamblin’ Hall”.

The line to check in was really long, we must have waited 40 minutes or so to check in. But when we went up to our room on the 19th floor, we were really surprised how nice it was for £55 per night. We had a great view, and it was nicely air-conditioned – well it needed to be, outside was 40 degrees and when you went near the window you could feel the intense heat from outside.

There was no internet surprisingly, there were a couple of third-party wireless internet providers, and I stupidly paid $9.99USD to one of them to use their internet for 24 hours. However, I used the internet for 90 minutes, then went to bed, and in the morning, it wouldn’t let me use the internet anymore – it redirected me to the payment screen again, even though by my calculations I still had over 12 hours left. Grr – I’d paid $9.99USD for 90 minutes of internet and some potentially dodgy company now has my credit card details. There was no phone number to call and no address to write to. The only consolation was that internet cafes in Las Vegas seem to charge around $12 per hour. Looks like it’s going to be four days without internet. I’m so annoyed about this rip-off wireless internet that I’m considering writing a separate blog post just on that to name and shame them! Boo Guest Internet Services, you’re a rip off!

We went out and got huge drinks each for $17 knowing we could refill them for $13. No way did we need a refill, they were so massive! We also did a bit of gambling. Hannah turned $10 into $45 on the money wheel, and I turned $10 into $0.

Thu 8 Jul

We went out for a walk down “The Strip” (Las Vegas Boulevard) to see all the sights. It was another 40 degree day, which made for tough going, but we braved it. There’s smaller replicas here of the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, and the Sphinx, which are cool, along with countless huge hotels and grand buildings.

Our ultimate destination was a hotel called Mandalay Bay located right at the end of The Strip, because The Lion King is playing there and we wanted to see how much it cost to go. We ended up buying two tickets for Saturday, but right in the very back row since they were the cheapest! At least they’re in the centre. Hopefully it will be good because I saw The Lion King the cartoon about 25 times when I was young and it came out (I think it was around 1996).

We got back after a couple of hours and tried out the Ballys pool, it was great and such a welcome relief from the heat. It was the first time in a very long time, possibly since school, that I’d been in a pool where I couldn’t reach the bottom and I had to try and remember how to swim!

Later on, we had the news on in our hotel room, and we heard that President Obama was in Las Vegas and was staying at Caesar’s Palace. Wait, we thought, that’s right across the road. Sure enough, we looked out the window and all the traffic had been stopped for his arrival. We waited at the window for 20 minutes, and the traffic was still stopped, but we saw no sign of the President, so we got bored and went back to what we were doing.

We went and refilled our massive drinks from last night for $13, and went and did some more gambling. Hannah had no luck with the Money Wheel tonight, and I didn’t do much better, but we both had a bit of luck on the pokies – Hannah turned a few dollars into $54.84 and I turned $9 into $18.14.

Fri 9 Jul

This morning we woke up, looked out the window, and saw that all the roads were eerily deserted – there wasn’t a single car to be seen anywhere as far as the eye could see. The news had said that the President was due at a speech at 9:20am, and it was now 8:40am, so we figured this was his doing.

Hannah and I had decided to have buffet breakfast which was across the road at The Flamingo Casino next to Bill’s Gamblin’ Hall, but when we went down at 9:00am to the street level there were police there that wouldn’t let us cross the road. We thought this was a bit weird because people were crossing across at the other two crossings we could see. So we talked to some people briefly who were also trying to cross about the President’s arrival yesterday, and then shortly after a huge motorcade of police came around the corner, followed by President Obama himself and he drove right by us. It was very cool! We couldn’t actually see him because his car was tinted, but it was obvious which car he was in. We felt very special to be that close to the President purely by chance.

We then got to the breakfast buffet at The Flamingo. It was $14.99 plus tax and it wasn’t too bad, although I’d been looking forward to scrambled eggs for ages but I didn’t like the ones they had there so that was disappointing. They made up for it though with a massive selection of desserts, there must have been 20 or so cakes, a chocolate fountain with fruits and marshmallows, and a build-your-own sundae bar. Yum! Although being breakfast, I was disappointed with the small amount I could actually eat. And when we asked the waitress for another drink, she snapped at us saying something like we should have ordered our drink before they seated us, which was impossible since we didn’t know what we wanted then! She didn’t care about that though, and it scared Hannah off ordering a hot chocolate.

We both needed our hair cut and coloured, so we went for a drive north of the tourist area, and set the sat-nav to try and find hair salons. All the ones it found were either in really dodgy parts of towns, or all the writing wasn’t in english, or it only had old people in there getting their rollers re-done, or it cost way too much, so we thought the only other chance we have was at the outlet centre that we saw near the airport, so we went there.

Paul Mitchell the hairdressers were having a sale in the outlet centre which was great, I got my hair cut and also got bleached highlights for $45USD, and Hannah got her hair coloured a really great light shade of brown. We had lunch at Auntie Anne’s (they have the best pretzels there with cheese dips and nice drinks).

On the way back to the hotel, we looked at the car’s dashboard, and it said it was 44 degrees (111 degrees farenheit). And I’d believe it too! Hannah was talking on the phone outside the outlet centre and I was going to wait with her but it was so uncomfortably hot that I had to go back into the air-conditioned shops.

Tonight our gambling didn’t go well, Hannah and I both lost $10 on the Money Wheel, and even though I won $10 from $1 on the very first spin, nothing more came of it. Although we had a good night at “The Tequila Bar” with $1 margeritas and $2 beers, and a $5 serving of tortilla chips and cheese which had so much cheese dip I couldn’t eat it all.

Sat 10 Jul

We slept in late today, until 11:30am! Then it was off to the pool for a while. But for the first time since we’d been here, we saw clouds, and were soon clouded over. So we went off early to Mandalay Bay hotel where the Lion King was showing. We got there at aboue 3:00pm for a 4:00pm showing, so we filled in some time gambling. On the Deal or no Deal game, I got a high offer of $9.34 on a $3 game, but I turned it down, and ended up winning the lowest box there which was $0.01. I still have the $0.01 cashout ticket as a souvenir.

The Lion King performance was great, despite being second row from the back we were right in the centre and we had no people either side of us, and it wasn’t that hard to see the stage, I thought it would have been worse. The people behind us talked a bit and texted on their phones a bit, but it wasn’t too annoying.

Afterwards we went to another outlet centre for more shops, I bought a polo shirt from Ecko. Then we had Mc-Donalds. I learned an interesting fact in Mc-Donalds – they don’t have McChickens in Nevada, only in California and other states.

Then we went gambling at Ellis Island Casino, we chose that one because the minimum bet on Roulette was $4 instead of $10 at the bigger casinos and so Hannah could learn how to play. She didn’t have any luck though, only winning one outside bet (red/black, odd/even, etc) out of six. I did better, I turned $40 into $67.50 on blackjack and then $30 of that into $85 on roulette – really the first time I’ve won anything decent all week. Although the last spin on roulette I put $3 on “double zero”, and the spin brought up the regular zero – if I’d put my money on the other zero, I would’ve won $105 just from that spin. I say bring back European Roulette which only has one zero.

Sun 11 Jul

Sadly it was time to check out of Ballys Las Vegas today, after checking out we went back to the pool and I ended up staying there for two and a half hours, and now I have radioactive legs. Oops.

Then it took us nearly 6 hours to drive back to Los Angeles because of the traffic, it seemed that half of Vegas heads back to California on a Sunday afternoon. Although we also stopped for KFC in Victorville.

Hannah said in the first day of Vegas that she could stay here for a year just chilling out, but today she changed her mind and said that we need to get back to reality sometime, and I agree. Besides, Vegas would get too expensive gambling every day! I’ll miss the pool though, although it sounds like London is having hot weather which is almost as good.

The sat-nav was having trouble, perhaps it was the heat or something, or the fact that LA just has so many roads, but it stalled twice, and reset itself three times, and once wouldn’t turn back on. Luckily though, during the periods that it was misbehaving, we didn’t miss any exits or turns, and we managed to check into Econolodge in Garden Grove. After removing the existing resident from the room (a bee), we settled in. And they have free internet! Which only works sometimes, from one particular point in the room. But better than nothing.

Ok, sorry this one took a long time to put up! But there was a lot of stuff to do when I got back from my trip.

The photos here aren’t all the photos I took – I took so many! But you can see heaps more photos here on facebook.

Sat 3 Jul
Woke up early in the morning and drove to get my washing, although the woman didn’t have it, she said something about the boss taking it to another laundry place to wash and she’d have it here by 7pm. Quite why the boss needed to take my washing elsewhere when there must have been at least 50 washers where we were was a bit confusing. Hopefully I see all my washing again.

We decided to walk past every single star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. We didn’t quite know how long it would take so we set out at about 3pm. I knew Michael Jackson had a star, of course, and his wasn’t hard to pick – it was the one with heaps of people all trying to take a photo.

And also, I knew Judge Judy had a star too. She didn’t have anyone around her, but I was not leaving until I got a photo by her star!!

While we were walking we took a brochure for a tour of Hollywood by this open-top 15 seater van. The lady trying to get us to sign up offered it to us for $25 each down from $40, but we said “we’ll think about it” and walked away, knowing very well that we would do it either tomorrow or the day after because it was something we wanted to do.

We also drove to the Griffith Observatory for a view out of LA, but all we saw was how polluted LA actually is, and we couldn’t see much!

Sun 4 Jul

Today was Independence Day, it seems to be one of the more important of the American days off. We didn’t have a lot of plans today, we did a few things that didn’t require a lot of effort.

First, I looked up “Top 12 things to do for free in Los Angeles”. The first few things in the list we’d already done: The Hollywood Walk of Fame, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre with the celebrity handprints, the Hollywood Sign and The Griffith Observatory. Another thing on the list was Venice Beach which we’d already planned to do today, but something else on the list was a Mexican Market in central LA, so we thought “why not”. It sold lots of touristy type things like t-shirts and stuff like that, one thing Hannah and I both would have liked to buy was a ukelele that they write your name on.

For lunch we had mexican food in the place in the market that was the best combination of “cheap” and “not likely to give us food poisoning”. I was a bit scared of mexican food from when I went to a mexican restaurant in LA in 2006 and didn’t like anything they gave me, but I thought since I’d been to Costa Rica and had lots of rice and beans there that I would be okay. As I remembered, they served me with three different kinds of mushy beans with cheese, two of which were okay, the other had this really strong sauce of some kind on it. But I had a side of rice so that helped me eat it all.

Another thing we did was drive through the centre of LA, and it was quite deserted. As I knew from last time, there were some tall buildings. Here’s the tallest:

We went to Venice Beach on the west coast of LA and lay in the sun for a bit. As usual, I got quite red, but not so red that it hurt a lot. Hopefully it doesn’t peel. We overheard some people say there were fireworks in the evening on the beach, but because we were parked in a 2 hour parking spot and because these fireworks were still four hours away, we went for a random drive around and back to the hotel, and then drove back again.

Little did we know that the whole of LA seemed to be there, so parking was a nightmare – we had to park a 20 minute walk away from the beach. Then, we learned (by following everyone else) that the fireworks were actually 40 minutes down the beach from where we parked. So, when the fireworks were over, we had an hour’s walk back to our car. But they were worth seeing. The man in front of us kept yelling “America! Heh heh heh, heh heh heh” in a Beavis and Butthead voice, and then at one point he dropped his beer. It was worth going all the way there just for that.

Mon 5 Jul

Today I’d originally planned to take us to Disneyland, but then I realised that it was Independence Day holiday because July 4 fell on a Sunday. So we left Disneyland for tomorrow and did the tour by open top van that we heard about on Saturday. This time they offered it to us for $20 each, which was even better!

We saw a few famous sites. Here’s Ringo Starr’s house, and the house Michael Jackson was in when he died:

Here’s Julia Roberts’ house, and the view she has:

Here’s one of the most expensive areas that I’ve ever seen anywhere – Bel-Air in Los Angeles. Every house was just so massive and as the tour driver said, you could just smell the money. And here’s the house from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

After the tour, we drove down to Anaheim which was about 45 minutes away from Hollywood, and checked into the Good Nite Inn in Buena Park, which was pretty good for the price.

Tue 6 Jul

Disneyland today!

At Disneyland, I personally was disappointed by the lack of thrill rides. Disneyland is divided into two parts, the traditional Disneyland that opened in the 50′s, and Disney’s California Adventure which opened in 2001. The latter was supposed to have more rides than Disneyland itself, so we went there first. There were some rides that were not bad, like the Tower of Terror which was an elevator that went speeding up and down through a haunted house, and “California Screamin’”, a roller coaster which offered some thrills.

We went on Mickey Mouse’s Ferris Wheel, which was kind of fun because the carriages swung back and forth, but then something happened and we were stuck on it for 10 minutes, and when we did get back down, they disabled the ride and sent everyone from the queue packing. They apologised for the delay but didn’t say what happened.

Although we arrived at 10am, and before we knew it it was 4.30pm, and we wanted to see Disneyland itself before dark. So we went across the path to Disneyland, and took the train that runs around the perimeter of the park. It looked like a fun place, clearly aimed at children, until at one of the train stops this child got on which was screaming so hard that after 5 minutes next to it on the train my eardrum was actually in pain, so we got off at the next stop to escape the noise.

In Disneyland we queued 70 minutes for the Space Mountain ride, which was a reasonably tame roller coaster but because it was in the dark it was a bit of fun. Everywhere you went had stroller parking, which was always full. In fact, by the time 7pm came around, the queues seemed longer than ever and the number of people in the park (considering it was a weekday) was astonishing. So we had a quick look around Disneyland and then went back to the car.

When we originally parked in the morning, they told us to write down where we parked. I thought “pfft, I don’t need to write down where I parked my car, I can remember just fine”. Thank god I did actually write down where I parked, because I would have never found the car again otherwise. It would have been lost in the unlimited time and space that is the Disneyland car park system – which cost $14 to park in, just for the record!

My LAN flight was supposed to leave at 5 minutes past midnight, but just before this time they told us that there was a technical problem with their plane and they’re unloading everyone’s bags and putting everybody on a new plane, which meant we’d be leaving an hour late. Not a problem, I’ve got 12 hours to kill in LA until Hannah arrives.

The LAN flight wasn’t particularly interesting because like usual I slept all the way, only waking up for meals. It wasn’t hard this time since we departed at 1am. I had an exit row which was a surprise because I hadn’t requested it – maybe after scaring me the check-in guy thought he should be nice to me. The old withering Japanese lady sitting next to me had to be moved because she couldn’t speak English or Spanish which meant she’d be no use in an emergency, but because she didn’t speak either of these languages she had a hard time understanding why she was being moved.

At customs in LA they were polite but strict as usual and this time they made me get all my bags checked in the customs. That didn’t surprise that me that much because I’d come in from Peru. They checked through two of my bags but didn’t bother checking through the others. They asked me if I had any Coca leaves (the leaves that we were chewing on to help combat the altitude sickness in Peru) and luckily I had not accidentally left any in my luggage.

I picked up my rental car, and drove out to Hollywood to check into the room for me and my sister the first three nights – Super 8 in “Hollywood Area”. It was nice enough, but because it was Independence Day Long Weekend in USA it wasn’t terribly cheap. It wasn’t too far from Hollywood itself, but some of the people in the area seemed a bit dodgy and strange. Although, after taking a drive through Hollywood itself, I noticed that a higher percentage of people than usual there are very strange indeed!

I was a bit early to check in, so I went and dropped off all my wet clothes from Machu Picchu to a laundry, and was told I could pick them up tomorrow for $14USD. A bit more expensive than the $2-$3 I would have paid in Lima for the same thing! I filled a bit more time in by going to the supermarket and then checked in to the hotel once they had a room cleaned. Then, I just hung around in the room until Hannah arrived.

Hannah flew in from London on Continental Airlines at around 7pm that night, I met her at the airport and drove her back to Hollywood. That night we went for a walk around the area and found dinner. We saw a few of the Hollywood Walk of Fame stars, but there was nobody we knew – we hoped that’s because we were at the very edge of the walk, and the more famous people were nearer the middle near all the landmarks. Anyway, we were going to find this out tomorrow.

I checked my emails and found out that Ian had had a very bad flight – apparently his and Richard’s flight had been diverted to a different airport in Buenos Aires, and they weren’t told about it, so when Ian looked for his taxi transfer it was nowhere to be found. When he asked the airline for help, he was told that the airline can’t do anything for them. So he asked if his baggage would still be checked all the way to Auckland like they were told, and he was told that they don’t check bags all the way through. Sounds like a bit of a nightmare – I don’t know what happened after that except that both he and Richard did get home with their bags, thankfully.