We had a good flight from London to LA. We had chosen a semi-exit seat where the aisle seat had nobody in front, but the seat next to it was a bit squished. I noticed there were a lot of empty rows of 3 seats by the windows, so I asked if we could move there. They said we could move after take-off. I had a look and it was going to be tricky nabbing the seats on the other side of the plane before someone else. I asked if we could switch before take-off. The airnz staff were awesome and arranged this for us. So we packed up our stuff and moved to the other side of the plane. The best part was that these seats convert to a skycouch. This is where the footrests come all the way up to form a bed. If we bought these seats in advance it would have cost us an extra £269.00 so we were very pleased to get them for nothing. So I watched a bit of TV, ate my meal, drank some wine, then crawled into my bed and slept for the remainder of the flight 🙂

Coming in to land was a bit freaky. It was like we were landing in high winds, but there was no wind. As we were coming in to land the wings started rocking from side to side (possibly because the plane was unbalanced with everyone moving seats) and when we landed, it felt like we were doing wheelies down the runway. I wasn’t too concerned as I know they can land sideways if need be, but Mikes hand is looking a bit bruised today.

We had a long queue at immigration that didn’t seem to be moving. The immigration man who checked me in was pretty scary looking. He was very solid, with tattoo’s down his arms and he was wearing black leather gloves. I dunno why the gloves freaked me out but they did. He sent Mike away because we weren’t married, so it was just me and black glove man. He must have noticed my fear as he spoke with a gentle voice and didn’t make me feel like I was a criminal (like they used to do at Heathrow before I got my British passport).

Finally an hour later we cleared immigration, picked up our bags and waited for the hotel courtesy shuttle to pick us up. We waited and waited and waited. By the time all the other hotel shuttles had been passed us twice we decided to ring the Radisson and see where their bus was. Apparently we had to call them to come and get us, and the pick up point was elsewhere.So we moved to the correct pick-up point and waited for a further 20 minutes and it finally arrived.

The bus driver was a black guy who had a bad case of verbal diarrhoea – kind of Eddie Murphy style. He picked us up and drove 2 metres up the road where we got stuck in traffic. “This is the chicken hour” he says. “Everybody they try to push in and change lanes without blinkers, dat why I call it the chicken hour. You gotta be switched on during the chicken hour. I’m always looking left and right. See dat guy there trying to push in without blinking. I knew he was gonna do dat. I’m good at knowing when they gonna push in blah blah blah” and on and on he went. “We’ll sit in this traffic, but when we get around the corner there will be a big hole. See that there – that big hole (he meant a gap in the traffic).”

He just went on and on for the entire trip which took ages as most of it was spent stuck in traffic. It ended up taking us 50 minutes to get to the hotel that was just around the corner. Had we known – we could have walked there in 5 minutes! OH well – these are things we learn for next time.

As it turned out it was good timing. We were to be meeting Sue (Doodle) and Terry here (our friends from NZ). They had arrived earlier in the day and had been to Santa Monica. I got a text from Doodle as we were checking in saying they had just arrived back at the hotel. So good timing. We managed to meet up briefly before heading off to our beds.

The road trip begins today.