San Francisco to Cedar City

Thursday 23rd April 2009

Today was a travel day as we moved from our comfortable Hilton Hotel near the San Francisco Airport to LA and then on to the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas.

We checked out of the hotel at 11am and drove to the airport where we left our gay car with the people at Hertz.  Then it was on to the very efficient air train to terminal number 1.  We had to do some juggling with the luggage for both of our bags to stay under the 50 pound weight limit but we did it.

Usual slow progress theough security and then about 45 minutes to kill before our Southwest flight to LA.  Southwest have a strange passenger loading procedure because there are no asigned seats.   So those who board in the second half have trouble finding a seat.  People before them take the aisle seat leaving the middle and window seat so that causes an issue when you need to ask them to get up so you can take a seat.  Also you find someone takes the window and another takes the aisle seat - then the person on the aisle looks down reading and hopes that nobody wants that middle seat.  In our case an elderly male had taken the aisle seat and so we wanted the window and middle seat.  This person seemed quite annoyed when we asked if he could allow us to get past to take the two other seats.

Anyway, the flight took off as good as on time and we had some good views of San Francisco as we turned south for LA.  The flight was a bit over an hour and we had a short wait for our luggage and then out to find the Hertz shuttle bus which took us to the Hertz lot.  No real issues with the rental, this time we have a Nissan Ultima.  Nissian is pronouced Niece Arn in the US. 

There was some disagreement about whether eor not we took the GPS advise of taking the 10 across LA to the 15, the shorter route, or the longer trip down and across to avoid the city for the rapidly approaching peak hour.  We ended up taking the GPS directions and had a very slow ride up the 405 to the 10 across to the 15 which takes you up to Vegas and if you want up into Arizona, Utah, Idaho and Montana and then Canada.

It took about 2 hours to drive to the 15 and then another 45 minutes to arrive in Victorville where we checked out a Best Buy.

Then another 30 minutes to Barstow where we had dinner at Dennys.

Back on the road at 8:30pm we drove for just over another 2 hours and made Las Vegas where we checked into the Luxor hotel - we were ony there for just over 9 hours which was just as well as there was no wireless internet and it was a little noisy.  It was 11:30pm before we checked in and we crashed as it had been a long day.