Malibu

I haven't mention all the other amazing beaches there are in LA and OC, there are just too many, but if you take a drive down the PCH, you will want to stop at all of them. Beautiful sand and great waves, not bad temperature for winter either (well not the water). Huntington beach is really nice and the sand stretches as far as you can see, great day out.

I hate admin, and returning the car was just that. Once we had finished with all our sight seeing we had to find the drop off spot near the airport and collect our new Hertz car. The Pakistani guy at the counter was a great salesman and got me going on about cricket and agreeing with everything he said that I even said yes to an upgrade. So now we were in a Honda Accord 2.4l tank. It made sense as we had far to go, the other Kia we had in store would not have cut it.

We drove back up to Malibu, to the campsite where we had left all our gear and pitched our tent that afternoon. Malibu is really nice and is pretty peaceful compared to the rush of LA and a lesser extent OC. We had already taken a drive along the coast through Santa Monica, seen the famous S. Monica pier and surrounding beaches so that evening after collection our car we took a walk down S. Monica boulevard, peering at all the shops and stopping at one of the fine Japanese restaurants for some good food and my fav. beer Sapporro as well as Celias fav. beer, Asahi. Two birds with one stone.

Our campsite in Malibu had an ocean view and was a little elevated giving you great views of the bay. Sadly when we woke up you could not even see past the coastline. They had an early what they call "May and June gloom". This happens aroiund that time when the fronts blow in from the sea and don't go anywhere cause there is no wind in Malibu because it's protected by the S. Monica mountains. They just wait for the sun to burn it off.

I still went for a run along the beach passing all these mansions build on stilts right on the water which unfortunately forced me to sing "the foolish man builds his house upon the sand..", for the entire length of my run, couldn't get it out no matter how many times I tried to switch songs, damn you Sunday school.

I also couldn't find Pam Andersons house along the water either.. seen it enough times on cribs so I had a pretty good idea what it looks like. I did see many Pam Anderson wannabe's that morning though.