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The bus from San Fran to LA was an absolute nightmare. I guess you get what you pay for, we opted to take the private charter bus run by a few of the hostels for $40 each. It turned up over an hour late and got a flat tire somewhere 200 miles away from LA, this added about two more hours to the 6 hour journey. We finally got to LA at nearly 11pm, got to the hostel in Venice Beach and crashed out after a long hot day.
While in Venice we stayed at the Venice Beach Cotel, which was operated by a crazy Israeli women. Who after two days of us staying there insisted on showing us her 'boys'... two guns. We got ourselves some surfboards for $200 each off of craigslist and carrying them back to the hostel we were reminded of the first month of our trip lugging the snowboard bag across most of Canada. The two weeks we spent in Venice consisted mainly of surfing and sunbathing. We considered using the nearby Muscle Beach gym equipment to get our bobies used to exercise but we quickly decided against it when we couldn't be bothered to get up that early in the morning.
We spent a day using the worlds worst bus system to try and get to Hollywood to see the famous sign and the avenue of the stars. LA is worth seeing if your in California but only for about a day. Kerry the Israeli hostel manager took us to the local gun range, you can't come to America without partaking in one of the nations most popular hobbies. We shot four pistols and a rifle and it was pretty fun!
After our two weeks in Venice was up we hopped on another delayed bus down to San Diego, apparently the bus system in America is nothing compared to Canada.
Our first night in San Diego was spent in the Point Loma HI hostel, a pretty chilled place, maybe a little too chilled for us. We moved on the next day to the Ocean Beach hostel just down the road. I think there are more Irish people in San Diego than there are in Ireland, and our hostel was full of them. There were times when we couldn't understand a word that was being said, it was like living in our own personal version of Father Ted.
Here our newly acquired surfing skills were truly put to the test with the majority of the sets coming in being over head height, something we had never before even witnessed, let alone tried to surf. As well as surfing we spent a lot of time on the beach, even at night as there were fires all down the beach every night.
We left San Diego for LA on another delayed bus, which almost made us miss our flight. It turned out that our flight while being a Quantas flight was actually operated by American Airlines. Possibly the worst airline i've ever been on. They tried to charge us $40 each for our bags and $100 each for our boards, money which we just didn't have! We managed to argue the case that Quantas has free baggage as well as free surfboard transit, and as our tickets are with Quantas these rules should still apply!
With the Man firmly put in his place we were off to Hawaii!
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