Following our couple of nights enjoying the sights and sounds of Vegas we got up early and headed on the road back to Los Angeles where we would soon catch our flight home. We stopped about halfway at Elmer’s bottle tree ranch which is someone’s front yard decorated with bottles. This was the first part of the trip that actually felt like we were in the “middle of nowhere” and we had to pack sandwiches with us as there was not a lot of stops on the way. We still somehow had 3 other cars stop at the bottle tree ranch while we were there, so even in the sparsest areas of the US there are still lots of people around!

The giant 4+ lane freeways start about an hour outside of LA which is how you know this city is so huge. We got to our hotel in Hollywood by the late afternoon and dumped our luggage before taking our hire car back to the airport for the drop off. We strangely felt quite sad dropping the car off as it had been with us for the last two months and returning it meant that it really was time to go home. The car only had a few hundred miles on it when we picked it up, so we estimated we did around 6,400 miles on the trip, which is actually the equivalent of driving Boston to LA and then back again!

We took an Uber back to Hollywood which took nearly an hour (LA traffic!) and spent the evening walking around Hollywood Boulevard looking at all the shops and seeing how they had changed since we were there on our last trip in 2016. We got dinner at California Pizza Kitchen where I tried a wholegrain pizza base that was delicious, I wish wholemeal bases were more common.

The next day we woke up for our very last full day of the trip and decided to take the hop-on hop-off bus around Downtown LA as I had not seen any of this area before. The route takes 2.5 hours and went through Korea Town and Little Tokyo and goes past Angel’s Flight so we were able to cram a lot of sight-seeing in by sitting on the top of the bus. By the time we got back to Hollywood it was lunchtime so we went to Johnny Rockets for one last old fashioned American Burger

We then decided to spend the afternoon going to some of our favourite LA spots, so we took another bus to the Farmers Market and Amoeba Music (which at that time was in it’s original venue). By the time we were done it was dinner time! We decided to go to Dave and Busters right near our hotel for a simple grilled chicken meal so our stomachs wouldn’t feel too heavy for the flight in the morning. Then we wandered around the Hollywood & Highland shops for one last time before going back to the hotel where we packed for our early wake up call, and with that the holiday was complete!