Bye Bye Holland
Ready for takeoff!
We packed our stuff and we're ready to go! After we arrive at the airport we have plenty of time to waste in the airport's tiki bar. We tried to persuade the management to let us take the giant decorative tiki (plastic Hawaii lei included!) to a more appropriate place like California, but they were quite fond of their polystyrene friend and wanted to keep him.
After twelve hours of airline food and in-flight entertainment, we arrive at the ridiculous chaos that is Los Angeles Airport. I don't know what it is about this airport, but it's always like this is the first time ever that a plane arrives and nobody expected it. There are lot of queues, lots of uniformed people frantically shouting contradictory commands, mostly just directing people from one queue to another and back. I swear I won't be surprised if they start using cattleprods for crowd control one day. It's all very unpleasant and very inefficient.
But, there's an end to everything, so after a while we're out on the streets of LA and free to go anywhere we please. We're happy to see Julia and Luca, who are picking us up from LAX. We drive to Sara's place - who isn't there but left the keys to her house in a secret spot - where we dump our luggage and immediately go to Venice Beach to have a smoothie at Cow's End. Oh yeah, the good life!
