"Livin' in Beverly Hills"

The pictures from our trip are uploaded (via my photobucket on the sidebar), but let me try to summarize some of them below so you are not completely lost in the slide show. (Also please note, of the 200 pictures I took on the trip there are maybe 10 of us and the rest are not-so-great scenery pictures, I guess photography is not my calling).

Los Angeles is ginormous and the pictures could never truly capture the essence of the city, both its beauty and its beast. It definitely has its glitz and glamour which you will see throughout my pictures, but the neighborhoods are pretty spotty and you have to remember LA has about a 14% unemployment rate and 3 different colleges, so depending on what part of town you are in, you will get a very different vibe.

We rented a car. Super fast. NOT! We got a compact, Hyundai, but it did sound fast. :)  We also got to use the bikes from our first hotel to explore the coast: Marina Del Rey, Venice, and parts of Santa Monica (which was by far the nicest of the 3). We later drove back to Santa Monica for the day and explored Malibu too. We saw one celebrity, former Lakers player, Rick Fox, while filling up at the gas station. There were a few others out and about that we heard about, but never saw, Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, Nicole Richie, and Ashley Simpson, to name a few. Oh well, we probably wouldn't have recognized them if we saw them out and about anyways.

Overall, we had an amazing time. The weather was a perfect 70-80 degrees throughout the day, with no clouds in sight. The shopping and food options were overwhelming to say the least. There were stores there I had only dreamed existed. If you have thought about it, there are at least 4 of those, each with a slight variation, within a 6 mile radius, including every dog shop you can imagine. There was never a dull moment.

Thank goodness for another fun filled safe trip. We are so grateful to get the time and opportunity to go on these sporadic trips together. God has truly blessed us with a common passion for exploring and taking in as much as humanly possible. Enjoy the pictures, sorry if they seem a little out of order, they probably are. I did a lot of rearranging and still had a hard time getting them in order. The captions should help.