Every Glorious Thing: Photos from America!!!

At long last, here are some photos from The America Trip.

If you kept up with out Coast to Coast Girls blog, hopefully you would have seen some of the photos I uploaded to Twitter so you will have some idea of what we were up to.

Did I mention I had a really great time? I think you can tell from my happy face in the photos...

Our first day was spent exploring Hollywood. We literally got off the plane, got on our coach for the day and drove to the Walk of Fame. We only had an hour to explore, and there was so much to see! It didn't help that we were all a little jet-lagged and groggy from the 14 hour flight!

Here we are waiting for our coach to arrive (it was an hour late, and LA was not the sunny California we had pictured, so we're tired, cold and a little grumpy in this photo!)

My first impressions of Hollywood were that it was actually really dirty, and I couldn't believe this is where they hold the Oscars! There were lots of dodgy looking t-shirt shops, and a few nicer looking shopping centres. We spent a while in Hollywood & Highland Shopping Centre, which was nice, but a bit out of our price range.

We also walked along the street (again, so disgusting!) but there was a lot of construction and so it wasn't very nice or particularly scenic. I was quite disappointed.

Mann's Chinese Theater & the Walk of Fame itself were pretty cool to see though.

Marilyn Monroe's star

Rod Stewart's star

Somehow, the group of girls I was with got so caught up in shopping and taking photos that we missed the Hollywood sign! We did see it as the coach drove further past the street!

The rest of the day was spent driving through LA, on our way to San Diego.

We finally got to San Diego around dinner time. For dinner that night, we went to International House of Pancakes (IHOP) which is pretty iconic in America. This is all I remember eating when I went to America as a kid! So I was pretty excited to eat there again after so long (and they still have the Funny Face pancakes I had when I was younger!)

First dinner in America (at IHOP!)

Dinner was interesting... it was our first introduction to American food. We found out you can't just order 1 pancake, all meals come with a minimum of 4.

Here's Brooke with both her and my meal. Ridiculous!

IHOP was just down the road from our hotel, so after dinner it was a quick trip to the hotel. We found our rooms and settled in for the night. Well, that was after we ran around to the others' rooms going "Which room have you got? Who's in here with you?" It was a little like school camp, really!

The next day we went to Sea World, our first theme park of the trip. It was so cold that day! We really thought we'd get "sunny California" weather.

We spent the day going around the park, looking at the exhibits, seeing shows and going on the few rides that were there.

The group at Sea World

The shows were the best part of Sea World.

We got absolutely drenched at the first one we went to because we had seats in the front row and the whales like to splash!

Some of our group paid extra to get closer to the animals, which is how I got these great close up shots!

The Shamu Rocks show was at night, and had lots of neon lights, music, and fireworks at the end!

That night, we got to have dinner with one of the stars, Quirky!

He swam around in the huge pool while we had a banquet style dinner. Luckily we weren't sitting too close, unlike others, who got splashed when he decided to show off!

The next day we went to Legoland...

Some of the teenagers weren't sure they wanted to go here, but it was actually really cool! They had heaps of rides, and different "lands" that all had different exhibits.

Unfortunately I got sick this day, so my group spent the first few hours looking after me while I sprawled myself out on whatever table or bench was available. Eventually we found a pharmacy at Legoland (who knew?) but it still wasn't very fun for me for the first part of the day.

Legoland... us with the "mini-land" of NYC.