We had a good flight and arrived in LA on time and ready to go! Then we had an hour queuing to get through immigration, which was pretty awful. Fingerprints and photos are now in the system! Once we made it to Alamo we decided to upgrade our car to a convertible PT cruiser - what fun! It is silver grey with a black roof and, although it takes a bit of getting used to, we've decided we like it! Because the window at the back is quite tiny, it is difficult to see behind, so we have to put the roof down whenever we need to reverse. But the temperature in Venice is just right for an open car - so we aren't too worried!
Venice Suites are as we remembered them - perhaps a little smaller, but perfectly nice. Our resident vagrant has moved on from the tree opposite our window - supposedly to Seattle, which is presumably another nice place to be, but without the lovely weather. The rest of the boardwalk chaos is pretty much unchanged. We celebrated our first night by having dinner at Sidewalk Cafe - not the best food in the world, but a lovely place to watch the world walk - or skateboard by. It was relatively quiet on a Tuesday night, but by Wednesday we could already sense that it was hotting up for the end of the week!
Food shopping on Wednesday - cheaper than Waitrose, but still quite a lot. We pottered around for the rest of the day, did quite a lot of walking - found a hairdressers for Friday, managed to get Moop some reading sunglasses to replace the ones he forgot, experienced cash machines that didn't work and cash machines that did work - and then had dinner at Piccolo, round the corner. All good stuff and much enjoyed!
