- Shopping stop at the Outlets at Orange
- Driving back to Hollywood
- Take the metro and bus to Santa Monica
- Dinner and drink
After yesterday's mammoth program, we sleep until 9 a.m. Then we drive to the outlet center “Outlets at Orange” a few kilometers away. Niki wants to buy underwear in the Victoria Secret, which is here. We are pleased to see that there is also a Lindt factory shop here. So we buy a whole collection of different Lindor balls and have a little bit of home to ourselves.
Then we drive back to Hollywood Boulevard. Once again, the traffic jams a little with every exit, although we are not going to one of the dreaded rush hours. By the time we are finally ready to go to Venice Beach, it will be a little late. Because we want to leave the car parked and get there by public transport. On the advice of the hotel employee, we drive to Santa Monica instead. That is safer in the evening. So you can take the metro and bus to the far-away Pacific coast. On the way we want to take a quick look at the Union Station building in a remarkable Art Deco style. The building itself is magnificent, but otherwise teeming with weird shapes. Not a place to waste time unnecessarily. The distances here in LA are really huge and our decision to spend the night again in the same hotel on Hollywood Boulevard turns out to be a moderately smart idea. At least the bus ride through downtown - where the architectural masterpiece of the Walt Disney Concert Hall is located - can be dismissed as a kind of sightseeing tour.
Finally arrived in busy Santa Monica, the sun is almost setting. We enjoy the relaxed and diverse atmosphere along the beach promenade. All sorts of different characters meet here. Break dancers show their skills and men with parrots and pythons stand ready for questionable tourist photos. When the stomach growls, we march to the busy pedestrian zone 3 Street. It is teeming with restaurants and all kinds of fashion shops that are open late into the night. However, we prefer the inexpensive variant of the adjacent food court of a shopping center. Afterwards we stroll through the alleys and have a drink in a bar. Then we make the time-consuming way back to the Coral Sands Motel. It seems like only Latinos and blacks use public transport here in Los Angeles. In any case, we are the only white people in the well-filled bus. At about 1 a.m. I finally go to bed tired.
