LA in Three Days

My dad and I flew into LAX on Thursday, January 6th- three days before school was scheduled to begin. No sooner had we gotten our bags and picked out a rental car than we were headed for the beach!

We had lunch on the Santa Monica pier in beautiful 70-degree weather. We then walked down to Venice and strolled along the boardwalk where we were met by all manners of pot-smoking, board-short-wearing, palm-reading, tree-hugging, hippie artists. The strange mix of people there  was already beginning to give me an idea of what a melting pot of cultures and classes LA is. As the afternoon dwindled, we cruised down the coast of Malibu, catching a gorgeous sunset over the Pacific. We grabbed dinner with an old friend and recieved our initiation into LA traffic as we foolishly tried to ride the 405 North at 6. After an excrutiating 40 minutes of sitting on the on-ramp, we finally got going at a steady 20 mph and made it to our hotel in only two hours.

On Friday, we set out to explore Hollywood. Our first stop was Griffith park, where we hiked up part of the way to the Hollywood sign and got a nice view of the sprawling city that would be my home for the next three months. From there, we made our way to Hollywood Boulevard where we checked out all the stars and their handprints (or wandprinst in the case of Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson). We hopped onto Sunset from there and cruised down Historic Route 66 through Beverly Hills. We ended the day at the Getty Center- an art museum in the Bel-air area, home of Van Gogh's Irises, a few Rembrandts and some Monets as well.

Saturday, we checked out of our hotel in Simi Valley and paid a visit to the Ronald Regan Library (which is really more of a museum than a collection of boring books and far more interesting than it sounds). There, we got to check out an amazing 50-foot "miniature" White House, saw a large chunk of the Berlin wall and toured Air Force One. Then, we grabbed lunch and made our way to the little town of Sylmar where the YWAM base is located.... and that is where the adventure truly begins!