Back to Los Angeles

We're now in the part of the trip that hasn't been planned in quite so much detail as the early part. The ANRA Summer Nationals were the second last event we had planned on attending, with our next planned commitment being the GoodGuys show at Pleasanton the following weekend.



Last night we booked rooms in Los Angeles and San Simeon. San Simeon is a town on the coastal route back to San Jose, as we've decided to head back from Bakersfield via Los Angeles, taking Route 1 up the coast through Santa Barbara, past Big Sur and on to Monterey and Santa Cruz.



Once again we hit the I-5 for the run into LA, this involves some pretty hefty hills and can put a bit of stress on a car during the heat of the day. This is the second time we've done that drive in the last couple of weeks, and the second time we've seen a car on fire on the side of the road during the climb. Knowing what was coming, we'd broken up the drive by stopping for lunch at a Fosters Freeze somewhere in the hills we were driving through.



When we got back to Los Angeles, the first thing we did was to check into our hotel room, then we headed off to do some of the things we didn't have time to do last time we were in LA. These included heading down to Santa Monica Pier and visiting Hollywood (in particular the Capitol Records tower area) at night and driving down Sunset Boulevard, again at night.



We also had dinner while on the Santa Monica Pier, at Bubba Gumps Shrimp Co., Bubba Gumps is a chain of themed restaurants based on the movie Forrest Gump, all featuring memorabilia from the movie.



I ended up with quite a few photos that I'd been hoping to get at some point and had resigned myself to not actually getting on this trip, so it's been quite a good result from the extra night in Los Angeles for me.



Today we're on the road again, taking the scenic Highway 1 along the Californian coastline and stopping overnight in San Simeon, just south of Big Sur.