Since my own wedding last August, the next great event on the horizon has been Robin’s wedding in California. We flew out without a problem from Heathrow’s terminal 5, and landed in LAX around 4pm on a sunny Thursday afternoon. The first job was to collect our cars. We all know that there aren’t any good American cars at all, but they do at least have lots of entertaining V8s. Sadly I couldn’t justify the cost of one of these, but I could afford a 2.7 litre V6 Dodge Charger. You may recall that a 1969 Dodge Charger was the star of TV’s “Dukes of Hazzard”. That’s about the only credibility this hire car had – in all other respects it was, as fully expected, rubbish. Still, it gave a great opportunity for an aviator “Licence, and registration” style picture:

It was at least in a decent colour, and had alloy wheels. Sadly, Ben’s had neither of these redeeming qualities.

A short drive had me convinced that this was in fact a 1.0 litre eco edition, such was the distressing lack of performance. I had to stop and check.

Sadly it was indeed a 2.7 V6. It was just incredibly shit. As expected.

Fortunately our hotel wasn’t too far away, and had a rather redeeming view.

To keep costs down, Ben, Sarah, Di and I were sharing a hotel room. Domitory style farting and snoring comedy was certainly the order of the day! I tried to move the beds further apart to ease the pain but typically this ended in bed-leg-breaking disaster.

The next day we set out to explore the local area. I managed to avoid the 5-0 ( I would be less fortunate in Arizona).

We stopped at Manhattan beach where I not only saw the Pacific ocean for the first time in my life, but even put a foot in it. It was damn cold.

We swanned around Beverley Hills, took in Hollywood Boulevard, and ended up on the Hollywood hills overlooking Los Angeles.

A quick picture taken on Hollywood Boulevard for the benefit of my colleagues!

On Saturday morning we checked out and wafted through Downtown LA to Pasedena (damn sat-nav was stuck on shortest route!). Pasadena is significantly nicer than LA main.

In Pasadena we met Robin, Jamie, Dave and Jen. Here are the boys ready for their stag do – we’re off to Vegas next!