Our first stop was Los Angeles for two nights. Nice to have the break before we do the very long LA to Auckland legs. We stayed at the Crowne Plaza LAX – great hotel with very friendly staff.
Thursday we biked along the Strand, a 20 mile bike path along the ocean from Santa Monica to Redondo beach. Rented a couple of bikes in Hermosa Beach and headed north on the path.
Volleyball, wow! There are a staggering number of volleyball nets set up on the beach and quite a few people playing on a Thursday morning
The path is pretty nice, sandwiched for the most part between hotels and residences and the beach with just a bit of on road section around Marina Del Ray.
The coastline itself is really boring by New England standards; just miles and miles of flat ocean and sand. All that sand is a serious playground though. Along with the volleyball nets there are large fire pit areas
and there’s a huge parking lot with tons of RV hookups; kind of a weird all pavement campsite
Many of the hotels and houses had nice landscaping in front. I especially enjoyed the patriotic pelicans
We gave some thought to hang gliding but decided to leave that for a another day
maybe in a future lifetime I’m thinking.
We arrived in Venice Beach about 12 miles from where we started. Venice Beach makes Hampton Beach look super classy but we did manage to find a nice little lunch spot on a side street
We headed back from Venice Beach and enjoyed a nice walk out on to the pier at Hermosa Beach after we returned the bikes. Hermosa Pier hosts the surfing Hall of Fame plaques and we even got to sit and watch a couple of surfing lessons.
Good way to spend the day if you’re not into Rodeo Drive or Hollywood Boulevard type stuff and want to get a bit of exercise.
Friday:
We checked out of the hotel and headed to downtown LA as our flight was not until 10:30 PM. First stop was the Grand Central Market; bit like the food court in Quincy market but funkier
We weren’t really hungry so we just passed through and emerged on the other side to find what I assume is a classic LA scene
No clue what that was all about but I saw several other tourists snapping pictures after I took mine – I suspect that none of us had a clue.
Our plan was to spend time at the Broad , a new contemporary art museum located up a pretty steep hill from the market. Lo and behold – there was a tram called Angel Flights just waiting for us!
The Broad was fantastic. We stayed there until around 4:30 and then Lyfted back to the hotel to pick up the bags and head to the airport.
The museum was built by the same Broad family that endowed the Broad Institute in Cambridge with an initial $50 million to “figure out cancer”. It’s a joint MIT/Harvard venture. They have a huge collection of contemporary art (more than 2000 pieces) of which several hundred are on view at any one time. It’s also free to the public and exceptionally well curated – paintings, sculpture, interactive works including two pieces of film/music – one merging the search for an albino penguin in Antarctica with a musical/visual rendition of the exploration done in Central Park, and the other of a collaboration of musicians performing the same piece but from different locations in the same building where they were all filmed, recorded and then projected individually, but shown in a single room where the individual parts all blend into the whole piece. They are both part of the current exhibition called:
Really fascinating and enjoyable. We took an interlude to have lunch next door to the museum and then came back and toured works from their permanent collection. Some showed how the public can blend with the art (not sure that this was in the original intent of the artist, but it works for me….)
Some works challenged the viewers perception of household objects
and others were just fun.
Got to the airport around 6 and that’s when things turned a bit weird. Our connecting flight from Sydney to Auckland is a full 12 hours after we land in Sydney. Turns out that you cannot even hang out in the Sydney airport for more than 8 hours without a visa. Yikes! Lucky for us, $140 bought us two visas, all handled by the Qantas ticket agent. Took a really long time to get that sorted but hey, we had plenty of time.
No TSA pre-check so we had to do the full on bag dump for security. I apparently did not do that properly and had my bag pulled for leaving a keyboard in there. That took another huge amount of time and suddenly we were not at the airport crazy early. Let’s hope that’s the end of weird.
Flight to Sydney was a merciful 15 hours of uneventful. We both got some sleep thanks to Melatonin and the new neck pillows,
With our shiny new visas we could take advantage of the Rydges Hotel for our 12 hour layover in Sydney. Rydges is right outside of the International terminal and offers discounted day rates for rooms from 9am-5pm. Way better than hanging out in the terminal for 12 hours!
I really enjoyed the gate status for our flight to Auckland
We finally arrived at our hotel at 1AM Auckland time. We were in bed and asleep by 1:15AM!
Hello New Zealand!