We left on Sunday morning, Laura and I and our rhino Tyler flying SouthWest to L.A. It was an easy flight. BWI security lines were almost empty. Never got through security so fast. In the third seat in our row was Jim from Boston. This was before the Revens-Pats game which was just as well.

We had two days in LA before our flight to Auckland -- we gave ourselves extra time in case there were weather problems with the flight. Our hotel was on Century Blvd, not the greatest area. We got into LA at around 3:00 local but for us it was dinner time. There was one decent restaurant at the Westin across the street and we ate there.

The next day we took a bus to Manhattan Beach and spent a few hours walking round seeing the sights. The bus was set up by a couple of shopping malls but we spent most of our time walking around the beach. We did stop at one of the malls to pick up an item we'd forgotten to pack.

Our flight was on Tuesday, but not until 9:15 pm so we decided to visit the Getty Museum. You can see pictures but only by being there can you see how beautiful the location and the architecture really is. The museum was a half-hour taxi ride and we had a really nice driver (in fact everyone we came in contact with was really nice and helpful). On the way we could see blackened areas on the hillsides burned out in brush fires in 2011.

The museum is far to extensive to be covered in a day and we only went through a couple of areas, A special pre-Rennaissance exhibition that Laura wanted to see and early European painting and sculpture.

We got to the airport a couple of hours before boarding. One strange thing -- in the whole internationa flight area there were only two stations to recharge cell phones, tablets and laptops. There were outlets around the walls but three-quarters of them did not work. In contrast BWI had four or five chsrging stations. I was unble to recharge my laptop before the flight.