Here we are in LA!

It is quarter past midnight on Monday in LA (and 08.15am on Tuesday in the UK). Having been travelling for over 24 hours, we are pretty exhausted but got here in one piece thanks to Alex T's amazing driving of our HUGE hire car - it's in the 'economy small car' range, but it's like a 4X4 and Alex took to the wheel straight away (having worked out how to switch it on - but we still don't know what 'L' means on the gear thing ('P' for park, 'D' for drive and 'N' for neutral and 'R' for reverse) Anyway, Alex was fearless as we drove up I405 (the massive Freeway from the airport to our hotel). Carbon footprints are huge here but the drive wasn't as scary as I thought it might have been.

So, what has happened so far? The first flight to Philadelphia took about 8 hours I think and was pretty uneventful: cheesy film, lots of quite nice food served regularly but - very noisy baby number one sitting next to us. The second flight from Philadelphia to LA was another six hours - extremely noisy baby number two, and demonic toddler crashing about and shouting all the way. Not much fun. Why people take small babies on long distance flights is a mystery.

What else? We did do a bit of museumy stuff: at Philadelphia customs, the guy asked why we were here and when we explained, he said we should just have been staying there as there's a children's museum called 'Please Touch' or something. Sure enough, there were even displays with real objects at the airport terminal advertising this - and the text panel was written by the resident exhibitions curator at the airport! Not sure whether they have one of those at Heathrow...

Anyway, that will do for now. Hotel is lovely although in the middle of the freeway (!) - amazing views from the bar on Floor 17 right across the city with live jazz playing. But now for some sleep.