La La Land, Manhattan Beach, It's Californication

La La Land, Manhattan Beach, It’s Californication

Published on January 15, 2011 by admin in California, Travel

(this happened on) Friday 17th July 2009, We are in LA

Proper Yank Car in the Manhattan Beach area

Los Angeles, LA, yep we are in La La land.

The first thing I do is my usual walk the patch and see what’s around us.

The answer is actually very little which I suppose is not that surprising as LA is rather a large City, there is nothing local to us.

When we were all up and ready to go out we got a Taxi to Manhattan Village shopping area, on the way we found out that Sasha and Basty had gone out at 1:00am last night to the Denny’s for pancakes!

Manhattan Village is a large strip shopping mall. We did the pharmacy for all our toiletries and then hunted down a big electrical store called Fry’s.

I was like a kid in a sweetie shop, this must be the greatest electrical store ever in the world, it sells everything necessary to build any electrical appliance, repair any electrical appliance or indeed the whole electrical appliance.

We did buy a Sat Nav (just $79.99) as we could not buy an American map for our Navman, apparently they are not that popular in the US, I should have kept my Tom Tom from the UK. Sofia’s cousin Nick had kindly offered to lend us one of his but as we are due to be here for a couple of months it was worth spending $79.99 to have our own while we travel in regions unknown.

That done we wanted to head to the beach, Nick had made some recommendations it was far too long a walk and Taxi’s were proving few and far between, so Sofia asked the Mall Cop on his electric trike, he was very chatty.

Apparently there is a tram style bus that goes around the two shopping precincts and then to the airport hotels including the Hilton and on down to Manhattan Beach, so we went and caught that. Just $3 for the round trip. We jumped off the tram at the beach.

There was a full on Volley Ball Competition in full swing.

The beach is a hive of activity as well as the Volley Ball, there are people riding bicycles along the beach path. The bikes they use here (Cruisers) look ultra cool, they come in bright colours, have wide spread handle bars, the don’t have brakes or gears. Sasha wants one, who could blame her, they are neat.

The houses in the neighborhood are beautiful as is the area, the homes overlooking the beach are right down on the beach front.

Such whimsical buildings all along the water front and down the hills leading to the water. One a minuet, another a Portuguese palace, the next a Swiss wood chalet, there is ultra modern and beach hut chic all squashed together.

We walked quite a way through Hemosa beach but as we did not want to miss the last tram back we walked back to find somewhere to eat before it got too late.

Everywhere seemed pretty busy and there was a very nice vibe to this area.

Nick had told us that this was the conservative area, a bit quiet and that Redondo beach would be better, but this area suited us fine.

The place we chose to eat at was called ‘Beaches’ a nice looking place but the food was was OK but missed out on being good, they tried too hard, but typical good American service.

We watched the sunset and had a very pleasant evening before walking back up the hill and catching our tram.

Back at the hotel, I spent ages on the Internet sorting out some flights for Sasha and also booking our rooms in Vegas.

Sasha flies to San Francisco to watch No Doubt and then flies to Vegas to watch Blink 182, you have to love the way our children make life difficult for us without a thought.