Today was forecast to be warmer than yesterday so we thought we had picked a good day to go to Santa Monica and Venice Beaches, unfortunately the forecast was wrong so the open top bus ride down to Santa Monica was actually quite chilly but we managed to stick it out. We got off at Santa Monica and had originally planned to take the other bus down to Venice beach, but after hanging around at the bus stop for a while and consulting the map we decided we would walk. We had a look at Santa Monica Pier although we didn’t go onto it as it looked a bit like Brighton Pier! The walk wasn’t actually that far and, being in America there is a sidewalk for pedestrians and also a bike lane so it was actually quite a nice walk. The beach is really wide and very white and fine sand, it actually runs for miles, just the Santa Monica part is over 2 miles long. It was a really nice walk and by the time we got to Venice beach it was lunch time so we stopped for something to eat then continued walking along the beach, the first part is full of beach volleyball nets, although no one was playing then we got to the bit where Muscle Beach is, where everyone works out, again there weren’t very many people working out and one of the guys actually looked like he really needed to! We walked a bit further then decided to get on the bus again to go round to Marina Del Ray which is where they actually used to extract oil, but the fields ran dry and they have turned it into a massive resort and living complex. We had a quick walk around the ‘village’ but I think it is a bit early in the season as not many of the shops were open. It was then time to jump back onto the bus back to Santa Monica then back to Beverley Hills, there are a lot of road works at the moment so the buses took a long while but we eventually got to the stop and we decided we would walk back to the hotel, again because of the roadworks we ended up walking back through a residential area which was actually really interesting, the houses are all really different, some really large and quite grand whereas others looked quite normal! We walked back up sunset strip which again isn’t quite what I expected, I think was expecting a small version of Las Vegas but it is actually quite subtle, although who knows what it is like at night. We stopped for something to eat then got back to the room about 7.30 for a relax before we hit Hollywood Boulevard again tomorrow.
