This site details the adventures of two hardy souls - Tara Cleveland and David Whyte - who embarked on a long and arduous journey to the other side of the world. They climbed steep mountains, sailed the far seas and searched for awesome beasts! Read on for fantastic! gruesome! and enthralling! tales of their adventures...
Does this site look a bit wonky? Are you using IE 6? I'm sorry that your viewing experience won't be perfect, but it takes too much of my free time to make personal sites work with an insecure browser that doesn't play nice with web standards. You should still be able to surf around, read my stuff and look at photos though.
We had a one day stopover in Los Angeles on our long journey to New Zealand. We stayed in the Travelodge LAX. Now the Travelodge LAX isn't just a flea bag hotel, it's a flea bag hotel in Los Angeles. This means that there are lots of fat people spending their vacations driving huge SUVs, eating their enormous Grand Slam breakfasts at the Denny's next door and then pretending to tan their pale, sweaty, bilious bodies by the pool under palm trees.
We decided to splurge and take a taxi to Venice Beach to get out and see the super freaks instead of sitting in our rooms and staring at the cacophony of wallpaper covering every inch (even the doors!) of our moldtastic double room. What else were we going to do to kill time between planes anyway?
Now the last time I was in Venice Beach it was completely deserted due to a very unCalifornian bout of freezing weather, so I was anxious to see what all the hype was about. It was pretty crazy. The buskers and vendors and people were kinda like a permanent Grateful Dead concert parking lot. Tons of incense, batik and hemp clothing, cheesy artwork, and people trying to get cash out of you in whatever way they could. We walked up and down the promenade taking it all in. We even saw a guy standing at the top of an 8 foot ladder holding snakes in his hands. He was totally stoned - so stoned he just stood there doing nothing - staring ahead with his bulging bloodshot eyes, holding snakes with his arms flung wide as if he were on a crucifix. It was odd.
Once you got off the promenade and away from the throngs, the beach looked exactly like Verona Beach in Los Santos from GTA San Andreas. So much so that I felt like I was going to find a hidden package pulsing and glowing behind the toilets. Or maybe a pistol by the lifeguard station. Or maybe I should knock that guy off his motorcycle, jump on it, rev it up and speed over the sand... yah... good idea... Surreal.
