Amy & Michael in North America: Los Angeles to Santa Cruz, CA

Venice Beach, Sunset

Los Angeles was quite enjoyable. We stayed at a property we found at Venice Beach and it was a wonderful location for seeing the coastal sights. We had access to two bikes and were able to ride to the famous Venice Beach boardwalk & Abbot Kinney Blvd in about 5 minutes. We spent our first day in Venice Beach and Santa Monica area. You could sit on Venice Beach Boardwalk and watch people all day. There are countless things to do and see there such as surfing, zip lining, there are volleyball nets at the beach, a tennis court, squash court, muscle beach, a pier, skate park, basketball court and I'm sure there is more.

A few blocks back you then have Abbot Kinney Blvd. It is a palm-lined mile of restaurants, yoga studies, art galleries and boutique stores. It's probably a little hipster if you needed to put a label on it. We rode our bikes from Venice Beach for about 10km. We headed through Santa Monica and if we kept on going we could have reached Malibu but it would have been about 26 miles all up I think, which we would have happily done if our bikes weren't so bad. Santa Monica pier is a happening place. It's the end of route 66 and is lined with restaurants and even a very mini theme park. Along our ride we saw dolphins just playing in the breakers about 30 meters from the shore.

Venice Beach is a beautiful place to see the sunset. It was a little cloudy the day we went but it was beautiful. You can see 2 photos below and 1 above.

Venice Beach, Sunset

Venice Beach & Santa Monica Pier, Sunset

The next day we boarded our buses and headed for Hollywood. For those of you who have not been to L.A it's awful without a car. We probably spent about 4-5 hours altogether trying to get to all the sights and even then, we did not make it to everything. Hollywood is crazy. We were wondering where all the people were and the traffic and, we eventually stumbled across it. We headed to Rodeo drive first and ended up walking the whole street (3.2km) and not just the famous shopping precinct as that is where our bus dropped us. It was a nice walk though, and quite peaceful. I like to think we passed lots of famous peoples houses, but we probably didn't. We then headed to Hollywood. It was very busy with lots of tourists. We saw the Hollywood sign and if you squint your eyes, and tilt your head, you can see it too! We spotted no celebrities but we did stand where they stood!

Hollywood Sign from Dolby Theatre

Grauman's Chinese Theatre

Hollywood Walk of Fame.

After L.A we started our Highway 1 journey to San Francisco via San Luis Obispo & Santa Cruz. The windmill game (which is pretty much just yelling 'windmill' when you see one) turned into the Mustang game, although I think Michael was the only one playing (every 20th car was a Mustang). The first day didn't really involve much coastal driving to San Luis Obispo, but the town is cute. It's the birthplace of one very famous Zac Efron and every Thursday night it has a market in their main street with delicious local food and produce.

The second day we set out for Santa Cruz where we spent 2 nights. This was the part of highway 1 with the gorgeous coastal views. It's very similar to our great ocean road. The only issue with the drive is that there was this annoying cloud cover that ruined our views for the most part. We did get some beautiful sights when we cleared it, but you can see from the photo it was just cloud and we probably had about 200 meters visibility for the most part but either way, we couldn't see the ocean. We did see a squirrel though and some sea lions. There were so many! That's pretty much it. We are have just arrived in San Francisco where we will stay for 4 nights.