Viva Los Angeles (Wednesday, November 2nd, 2016)

We have decided to fly into Los Angeles a day early.  We have learned from past travel that if we arrive a day early into our departure city, we get a good nights sleep before taking off on the long flight ahead of us.  It helps us immensely with our adjustment to the new timezone and the confusion that is likely to occur on the other end.

I entitled this post Viva Los Angeles, because while we were in Lake Havasu City a few weeks ago, they were experiencing a lot of seismic activity in the Salton Sea area of California.  This is the area where the San Andreas Fault meets with many other faults, and is an area of great concern when any of those faults become active. 

From October 1st to October 4th, the City of Los Angeles, and all of the surrounding cities were on earthquake alert. According to the news in Havasu, an earthquake has not occurred in that area for around 300 years, and do to this increase in in seismic activity, they raised the chances of an earthquake from 1 in 6000 to 1 in 100.   But after a few days, the seismic activity slowed down, and we haven't heard any more about it since we returned home, so I guess the countdown continues.  And as far as we know LA is still in tact!

Steve's parents drove us to the airport and we went in to the counter to check our bags.  They have a new process, where you have to log into machines and print out your own luggage tags. It's really easy, and saves a lot of time at the counter.  It was just confusing today because no one knew about it, so everyone went to the counter and got turned away to go get their luggage tags before they could return to the counter.

When we got off the DIA train between the main terminal and concourse C, we noticed a man who looked very lost, so we approached him and asked if we could help. He showed us his ticket which said he was on flight 1404 to Houston, so we took him over to the departures sign to help him find his gate and to our surprise his flight didn't show up on the board.  So we looked more closely at his ticket to make sure he didn't have the wrong day.  He had the right day, and his ticket said gate C25, so we walked him over to that gate to see what we could find out.  

As we were walking, we asked him where he was from as he said Chihuahua, Mexico.  He was on his way home.  When we got to gate C25, they affirmed that we had him at the right gate, so we left him there to wait for his flight.  He was so appreciative of our help, and we are just hoping that if we get that lost on our journey someone will have mercy on us and help us out as well. 

As we headed to find our own gate, we noticed that there was a new restaurant on the C concourse.  It was called Tamales by La Casita. 



We ordered a tamale plate and a steak burrito bowl.  They were both good, but the tamale plate was amazing, and it was only $6.75. They had even smothered the tamales with green chili for us at no extra charge.  We loved it!  We'll have to remember this place for our next trip through DIA.

What's left of the tamale plate.  It was great!

We got our order to go and and filled our water bottle in the airport after we got through security, it's a good thing we did.  The flight was so rough that they were never able to do the in-flight service, so we never got any snacks or drinks for the whole flight.  

I'm sure everyone around us hated us as we ate our Mexican food and drank our water on the plane, but we were very happy to have it.

We left Denver at noon and landed in LA at about 1:30 pm and caught the shuttle to our hotel.  We took a short walk and then enjoyed a Tecate by the pool as we tried to make this day in LA count as the start of our vacation.



When dinner time rolled around we decided we just wanted something easy, so we walked around the corner to the Sizzler Steak House.  

As we were walking over, we noticed a truck parked on the street and Steve said "That truck was there last November when we were here."  We thought that was kind of strange, so we took a picture. We'll see if it's still here next year.

It's a pretty memorable looking truck

When we got to the restaurant, we each ordered the salad bar.  We didn't set our expectations very high, but were pleasantly surprised. They had a really nice salad bar with a large variety of items as well as a lot of pre-made salads.

Salads we made from the salad bar

Pre-made Sweet potato pomegranate salad, Yum!

They brought us garlic toast to go with our salads, and kept clean plates and soup bowls coming.  They also had a soft serve ice cream bar for dessert.  

We're not usually big buffet people, but the salad bar really hit the spot tonight.  

When we got back to the hotel, we took a quick dip in the hot tub and then went back to our room to watch the Country Music Awards and the final game of the world series on TV.  We had to keep flipping back and forth so we wouldn't miss anything.  Right now the Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians are tied at 6-6 in the 9th inning.  Yikes!

Although this was just a quick stop on our way to Cambodia we really tried to get our vacation started right. Now we'll call it a night and start out early tomorrow morning on the next leg of our journey.