Hi everyone,

First of all sorry it's been so long since we posted any photos up, the states was pretty hectic and were still getting into the whole living out of a bag thing.

We're in New Zealand now and starting to get a bit more accustomed to being backpackers. We'll fill you in on the 12 days since we left the UK:

16th Jan - 26th Jan: Los Angeles-Las Vegas-Grand Canyon

Joined on this part of the trip by Ricardo (Richard Wise/Reek), we had a nice smooth flight to LA landing at 2:30pm meant we saw the Hollywood sign as we landed (which was just as well because we didn't see it again!).

First impressions of LA were that it is absolutely huge, we were amazed and hit hard in the wallet when we found out that a dozen LA blocks actually take 45 minutes to drive through in a taxi! The taxi dropped us in West Hollywood, not too far from Beverley hills, where we got just enough time to walk 'The Walk of Fame' and grab a burger before we crashed out completely (Jet Lag).

On the next day we got our car, a sweet Chrysler PT Cruiser, much better than we had expected given the name of our car rental firm; Super Cheap Car Rentals Ltd. We were on the Interstate 15 Freeway to Las Vegas in no time. The journey was pretty spectacular a lot of it spent cruising through the Mohave Desert with vast stretches of barren land either side of us and mountains far off in the distance.

Las Vegas was amazing, the pictures tell most of the story and you'll see from them that we managed to do a whistle stop tour of almost every major hotel in the main strip. We saw a traditional Las Vegas showgirl performance and managed to loose somewhere in the region of 50 bucks in the casino, oops!

After our last night in Vegas on the 21st Jan, we went off to the west rim of the Grand Canyon, this was incredible, by far the most striking part of the trip so far for all of us, we even had a chance to learn some of the folklore surrounding the canyon from some of the locals from the native Indian tribe that reside in a nearby town.

Seven solid hours of driving later and we had made it back to LA from the Grand Canyon. And we were just in time to witness an Earthquake (3.2 on the Richter scale). Our hostel on Venice beach was in an ideal location to have a stroll up the famous muscle beach although apparently the muscles couldn't brave those chilling 14° California winters, the beaches were very quiet.

After a few days spent exploring 'Venice' and nearby Santa Monica, we headed to Universal Studios for our last day in the US. This was much more than just a theme park, the performers and guides went into a lot of detail about the making and history of films at the studios, we also got to be a part of a lot of cool special effects.

The next day we parted ways with Ricardo, boarded a plane to Auckland and here we are now in Christchurch. We have a room for tonight and will likely stay in Christchurch one more night before going on to nearby Akaroa. We'll be in touch soon, sorry this is so long, didn't realise quite how much had happened in those 12 days.

Love

Alex & Sophie

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