Paddy – L.A.

Our first experience driving on American roads was a good one. We were out of Vegas in about 10 minutes & then onto the large roads (Ive no idea what denotes freeway or interstate so Im just calling them large roads :S) Once your on those its plain sailing (For anyone who hasn’t driven an automatic theres no gearstick or clutch to worry about, once the cars in drive, you just control acceleration & break) So anyway once your on the motorway, the inside lane is for trucks & slow moving vehicles, middle lane(s) for normal traffic, & outer lane for fast moving & overtaking. A lot of the way there was a hard shoulder on both sides too, & Darren reckons that’s for emergency vehicles, good idea. As we got closer to the city another mysterious lane appeared on the fast side, lined on both sides with continuous yellow. Took us a while to cop that this was the car pool lane , but once we did we took full advantage.

The first thing that hit us as we got closer to L.A. was the drop in temperature, & that was just fine with the 3 Irish boys. Desert climate doesn’t suit pasty white Irish skin too well. L.A. isn’t exactly cold either, but the weather we’ve had while we were here was akin to a really nice Irish day, so much more manageable.

So enough intro. What did we do in L.A. already? Well pretty much just universal studios. Yesterday morning we got up early & subway’d our way over there. Tony did a different universal in Orlando & him knowing the lay of the land was the only reason we got to see as much as we did. When the lads initially told me about universal I didn’t think it’d be my kind of thing at all, I’m not into rollercoaster’s & generally a big chicken when it comes to anything that tosses me about too much. I was pleasantly surprised that there were only 2 of them though, so most of the attractions were chicken friendly.

We saw 2 3D cinema type things (Shrek & Terminator), A couple behind the scenes exhibits (special effects & animals), backdraft & the famous studio tour & a couple more which escape me right now. Even being there at 10am, we barely fit in the last thing we wanted to see as the park was closing at 6pm. All in all I think we really enjoyed the day out, but it really took it out of us. Theres tonnes of cool pictures & videos but we haven’t had a chance to upload any so those will follow shortly.

As I type this its 8am the following morning & the other lads are still asleep. Im having trouble adjusting to the sleeping patterns & woke at 6 this morning :S. In a couple hours we’ll be on the road to San Fran & the next leg of the adventure! See you there