LA - Day 2 Beverly Hills & Santa Monica

First up on our agenda for the day was to check out Rodeo Drive and the Beverly Wiltshire, which is the movie made famous by the movie Pretty Women. I love that movie and one of my favourite scenes is the one where she goes shopping on Rodeo drive, so I definitely wanted to make sure we checked it out. Rodeo drive itself is actually a long street, but the portion with the shops on is quite small. It was fun to walk up and down and check out some of the expensive cars and plastic faces :)

Beverly Wiltshire

After that we made our way to Santa Monica. This part of LA is really cool, and has a very different vibe to the rest. It's very beachy and everyone seems quite laid back. We checked out the Santa Monica Pier which was absolutely packed. We didn't actually realise that the next day the LA marathon would be taking place, and it ends in Santa Monica. So I think it was even busier than normal. We rented bikes from a place right by the pier and then cycled along the beach bike bath towards Venice beach. This was a really nice cycle all along the beach in a bike lane and was a nice way to see some sights. 

After about 15 mins we started seeing the start of Venice Beach. I know most people would've seen or heard of Venice Beach, but it's even more crazy than you can imagine. There are people everywhere selling all types of things and people performing and walking around. One thing Jeremy and I noticed is the amount of homeless people in the US. I'm not sure if it's just because you become so unused to seeing them while living in the UK, or because we weren't expecting it, but it is really prevalent everywhere we have been so far. Venice beach definitely has it's fare share of homeless people and a lot of them are along the street selling things or begging. Although in Venice beach it doesn't seem as out of place really. We stopped at the skate park to watch the people skating and some of the guys there were really impressive. We spent a good while watching them do tricks. One of the cool things about Venice beach is just the sheer number of things going on. There are the handball courts, muscle beach, people skating, rollerblading it's just endless. You basically spend most of your time turning your head trying to look at everything. It was fun, and the photos probably don't do it justice.

Venice Beach Walk

After we had seen all we thought there was to see, we headed back towards Santa Monica to drop our bikes off and hopefully check out the sunset. Unfortunately we couldn't find much in terms of bars along the beach, but eventually found a sushi place with an outside section where you could kind of see the sunset. It was really nice to relax and take everything in, but the place was a bit overpriced for what we got. It was nice enough though and one of the waiters was the guy that played the Sherminator in American Pie, which was the only 'celeb' we saw. Guess American Pie didn't pay that well after all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1CgGxPWyI0

Once the sun had set we decided to head to the 3rd street promenade which is a pedestrianised shopping area in Santa Monica. We had a good time wandering around and listening to the various singers and performers who were all playing on the streets. 

It was a good way to end of what was a really fun day in Santa Monica.