This ones for you AlLAson!!

we shall call this: "fake excitement"

Allison has been bugging me to finish my blog...so here goes!

We left Vegas on Sunday...let me re-phrase, we crawled away from Vegas on Sunday at a snails pace because apparently the entire state of CA goes to Vegas on the weekends and heads home at noon. Meredith drove us the 45 minutes to the California state sign and after taking the lamest state sign to date, she bribed "never one to turn down a dolla" Allison to drive for her for an "hour" (which actually turned into the rest of the way).

After about 5 hours we started to see the smog covered mountains and we knew we had finally made it! 3,000 miles later we had finally reached Los Angeles!! Woo-Hoo!

We checked into the O-hotel right in downtown L.A. (thank you once again Hotel Tonight) which was a "boutique" hotel and had recently been re-done. It was really nice, but made us feel reallly dumb when we couldn't figure out how to flush the toilet or turn the A.C. on! L.A. is too smart for us southern-folk.

bar downstairs in the lobby

 Once we got all that figured out, we headed out and walked to a near-by sushi restaurant that I can't remember the name of and have no pictures of...at this point in the trip, I was over carrying my big-ole camera around all the time. The restaurant had a real sassy-chef who had lots of rules for how you ate your sushi which was kind of weird, but the sushi was AMAZING, so we let it slide. After dinner, we walked around downtown looking for a cute dessert shop and stopped in Bottega Louie to look at their amazing dessert bar. It was way too crowded so we left, but as we were walking by, Meredith spotted our first celeb!! I told them at the beginning of the trip we would see at least one celeb on our journey and they both laughed in my face and called me crazy! Whose crazy now?? BOO-YA!

Hey Mitch!

If you (sadly) don't know who this is, it is the guy who plays "Mitchell" on the TV show Modern Family. I felt kind of bad taking his picture, but not bad enough not to do it! If he had been eating with his on-screen hubby Cameron I definitely would have gone in and asked for a picture with them! We all acted like total dorks after seeing him and immediately called someone to tell them about our exciting celebrity sighting! 

We continued walking around and finally found a cute dessert shop to stop for some yummy treats and old school games like Jenga. 

Once we finished dessert, we headed back to the hotel (and yes, I insisted on the same route so we could see Mitchell again) and chilled out for the night. Allison and I laid in bed and worked on our blogs while Meredith headed to a secret location for her nightly chat with her BF. I was working on my Grand Canyon blog and gave Allison a healthy dose of the giggles when she saw my "Troll Spray" picture that went with my blog, and while laughing she said "You are funnnyy TO ME" (you really have to hear the way she says it to appreciate it) which made me have a laughing/crying fit...something that seemed to happen a lot on this trip. It was times like this that made me realize how much I'm gonna miss this little lady over the next year!

Monday morning we walked to a vintage store Meredith found that was supposed to be really cool, but it ended up being a little further than we thought. This was really was not fun because I chose to wear a pair of Meredith's shoes that day (hello blisters!), but it was a cute store, and there was a Pinkberry next door, so all was well in the world...until the walk back to the hotel. youch!

yum!

Next we decided to go to Venice Beach which was about a 30 minute drive from downtown...and shockingly we didn't get lost on the way! L.A. driving really was not as bad as I thought it would be, but I'm only judging from 48 hours, so I could be very wrong. Traffic was definitely bad, but I feel like people didn't drive as aggressively or fast as they did in Atlanta and Texas. 

   We hung out here most of the afternoon, mostly because none of us had any ideas of what to do next and it was close to 5:00, so we didn't want to attempt getting back during rush-hour traffic. We walked around on "the boardwalk" which was mostly just sketchy looking stores and medical marijuana evaluation centers. We decided to go grab some dinner to kill time and ended up going to Larry's, which was actually really great!

   Allison ordered a salad that was supposed to have figs in it, but she never found those darn figs! Meredith and I ordered pizzas and they were awesome! We talked about how we couldn't believe this would be the last time we would eat dinner together on the trip...or at least a year for that matter. We also made Allison a little sad by contemplating an earlier flight the next day, but we had puppies and husbands to get home to! We ended up keeping our original flight time though, so Allison had every last second with us!
   After dinner we were walking back to the car and I realized it was almost time for the sun to set, so Allison and I decided we would go sit on the beach and watch it...Meredith opted out to go sit in the car. Silly ninny! It was a little chilly out, but it was a beautiful ending to the day!

love you sea biscuit!!