Back to LA - HartmanTravels.com

Back to LA - 13th February

Holiday weekend and Valentine's Day (big deal in USA) makes for a difficult time finding a reasonable hotel.

We left Encintas around 10:30am for LA. Slow going on I5. I5 runs from the Mexican border in San Diego, through LA right up past San Francisco, Portland and Seattle to the Canadian border just before Vancouver. Not sure what was causing the delay. Closer to LA I found myself on a toll road with no way of paying the toll, I later went online and paid the toll.

The plan was to visit Marie and Charlie - Shannon's parents and then find a hotel. We have stayed with Marie and Charlie before but they are more crowded now with a daughter and two children returning home to live. Marie and Charlie insisted we stay anyway. Given the hotel situation we really had no choice. Kind of cool because we get on so well. Amazing how much Marie and I have in common and Charlie is retired LAPD, real cool stories.

We chatted for ages before dinner at Lucilles, that made Scott jealous.

Back home and we chatted more. Nice night.

LA - 14th February

Sunday we slept in a bit before having breakfast. We did head out to a Lowes Hardware and Rayls checked out a Joanns at Del Amo, she found that frustration as they had a Presidents Day weekend sale with items 50 to 70% off but no more luggage space to get it home.

We had an awesome ribeye steak dinner. So nice.

Great talking to Maria and Charlie, so much in common.

LA - 15th February

Last day. We pottered around, final packing. A Walmart and a K Mart for last minute supplies.

Lovely roast dinner before we left for the airport at 5:30pm. We parked the car and checked in - easy. Retrieved the car and headed to the nearby In n Out burger where there is a small park just under the LAX flight path, you feel like you can reach up and touch the planes.

Cost $33 to fuel the car which was close to empty.

No issues with car return and the shuttle bus back to the airport was easy as we had already checked in and dropped our luggage.

Rayls is still sore from this sciatica and was using the walking stick and therefore we got priority security.

Got to the gate (152) around 2 hours before our flight. I asked about more leg room for Rayls which we got. We were allowed priority boarding which was good. Departure was scheduled for 10:15pm but doors were closed just a few minutes after 10pm. Still didn't back out till 10:20pm and then there was a 10 minute delayed at the end of the runway waiting for other flights to depart and arrive.