Sam and Leah: LA + JOSHUA TREE NATIONAL PARK + VEGAS ARRIVAL

well, weve been pretty busy since last post.

From Santa Cruz, we drove south and got a hotel in Santa Barbara. Really nice town, typically very californian.
We only stayed a day there because it seemed pretty expensive and we couldnt find cheap enough accomodation.

So we decided to head straight to LA. Got another room there in Santa Monica which was awesome, right in the middle of everything, (Venice Beach, Santa Monica Pier etc) We caught up with 2 friends who we were living with in Canada, that was really good.

We cruised into Hollywood to see what it was all about and it was pretty dissapointing, but kind of what we expected. Pretty old and run down but it was cool to see the stars on the walk thing and the sign.
We got some tickets to the taping of the show " The Doctors" which is shown in Oz so you might be seeing us soon. We met up with our old swedish roomates from Canada there which was awesome. The taping was pretty fun and interesting, but you wouldnt want to go to more than once. Pretty funny how fake everything is.

Anyway LA was a heap of fun, very expensive to stay if you want a decent location. We will stop in again on the way home and stay in the hostel which is way cheaper (would have done it this time but had nowhere safe to park the car). Was good to catch up with a bunch of roomates and share stories etc.

From LA we headed west on the craziest Freeway we have been on yet, 7 to 8 lanes of pure mayhem, was pretty good to make it through there.
We headed to Palm Springs for just a few hours to check it out and eat some food. It was full of old rich people and heaps of gay people which was surprising. The check for for our lunch for instance came out in a red high heel shoe!!! It was like an upmarket Noosa or something.

From there we headed towards Joshua Tree National Park which is in the Mojave Desert. We got the last campground spot in the park on a cancellation which was lucky, and The Swedes turned up with there travelling buddies so we had about 8 people on our site. It was such an rad place, hard to explain but just so different to any place ive ever seen. we got some good photos of it. There are 4 or 5 campgrounds in the park and they were all booked out, so we could only stay for one night there which sucked, we did a few hikes and went to a cactus garden, this place called skull rock.
Joshua Tree was definitely one of the highlights of the trip so far.

Failing to get any accomodation in JTNP, we decided to move on to Las Vegas,which is where we are now and we will be here for a week. We got lost instantly and I got directions of a Homeless Back man which turned out to be very accurate, and he only charged me $5, what a nice man. We booked one night at 'Arizona Charlies' and 5 nights at 'The Tropicana' which is on the strip. Already lost $30 on roulette but leah turned $1 into $28 on the pokies, so we
are even for the time being, haha.

Here are some photos.

View of the beach, from Santa Monica Pier.