America: Last one, I promise.

From San Francisco, we drove very very slowly toward Los Angeles. Along the way we hit a couple of very nice beach towns, Pismo Beach and Santa Barbara. We were only in each town for one night, but they were both very nice, sun shining and beach adjacent. The rest of the driving, which wasn't very far, was broken by stops at outlet malls. These things are mind bogglingly big and mind bogglingly cheep, and we bought a mind bogglingly large amount of clothes and shoes.

The reason we were slowly making our way to Los Angeles, apart from flying out of LAX, was the arrival in this part of the world of our dear friend Ali Jones, and the Griffith Med crew. We gave them a night to get over there jet-lag, and the next day we all went down to Santa Monica beach to watch the sunset over the Pacific.

The gang arrive at the beach.
It's behind the trees, I swear.

Ali's just happy to be outside.

Bailey, Brodie and Stephanie. (Left to right)
The Med crew take photos of the sunset.

And then the sun went down.

Its kind of like a metaphor for the sun going down on our trip.

Except that isn't what happened. Ali and crew did depart the next day, but they were going to Las Vegas. Their trip was only just starting. And we had two days left.

So, the highlights of Los Angeles...

The Ronald Reagan Memorial Bowl.

2000 calories in a milkshake. The PB&C from Cold Stone.

And a day trip to San Diego.

Another nice day.

Another nice beach.

And then on the drive back, we got this photo of the LA smog.

There are hills in the background, I swear.

A few minutes later we experienced the reason for the LA smog, the last 10 miles of the drive home too over 3 hours due to traffic.

So that is it for the USA road trip. We spent 9 hours today in LAX, because we had to drop the car off at midday and our flight is at 11:50pm. In 13 hours time, we'll land 31 hours later on Saturday morning. Then on Monday, its back to the real world.