AFTER an early-is breakfast I get a little work done then we go to meet our pals Greta and Robin for lunch at a Mexican place a few miles away in Orange.
It’s great to see them and catch up…and the grub’s good too. We spend a nice couple of hours hanging out then we go to find a laundrette and do our washing. Hopefully that’ll see us though the rest of the trip.
We’re meeting other pals in LA later on – its about 25/30 miles away. We want to miss the traffic and I have a cheque from last week’s House of Blues show we wanna try and cash.
It’s drawn on HSBC and we stoop at two branches finally being told that – because Live National is such a big company – they cannot verify the signature on the cheque, so can’t do anything with it!
The HSBC staff are nice, though, and when I mention I have a US bank account direct me to a branch of my own bank nearby…turns out they also have machines that a accept pay ins in every Target store across the USA!! I was aware the bank has an app that lets you scan a cheque and pay it in digitally, but the app is only available through the USA App Store. I’d tried to change the ‘home country’ store and was instructed first to cancel my Apple Music sub. I did that and was still told I needed to cancel out. FFS!
We’re not meeting our pals ’til 7pm so have time to go to Griffith Park where we park up and get the shuttle bus to the observatory form where there’s amazing views over Los Angeles and over the the Hollywood sign, albeit in the distance.
The sun’s down when we get there and we watch the LA lights come to life as darkness falls.
We find Kirty and Joe’s house no problem and enjoy a beer and a catch up before heading out to a local restaurant where we have a lovely meal with them and their daughter Laurie.
Like other nights, the return drive to Santa Ana is relatively quiet and quite a bit faster than our outward journey.
[adsenseyu1]