We arrive in LA with crossed fingers, so many cars, so many lanes. What it looks like is the drive to hell, and I'd always thought Chris Rea was on about the A19 when he wrote that damn song. In terms on scenery, there is none. This is the only place that is just quite ugly, endless freeway after freeway, malls, parking lots and palm trees shoved in random places like frilly toilet brushes artfully positioned to hide stains on worn lino. We discover quite quickly that because LA is so big it is actually like a series of towns with busy freeway in between each, if you want to see anything you have to have a car. I think this is what disappointed me most about the place, the smog you have heard of but then experience makes the place feel quite dark and gloomy compared to elsewhere on the West coast. Sky wise it is neither here or there. The sheer quantity of cars and the amount of traffic makes it slow to get anywhere, and there isn't really many places to go for a walk to by our hotel, which means after dark we are stranded there. Luckily it is nice hotel, and something has changed, since I arrived something in my head has flicked a switch and is starting to think about home for the first time since I got on the plane. Is everything being looked after? Wonder how so and so's thing went? Is my luggage going to be within weight?

I have had a good time, but I am ready to go. We spend a day on a mission for Wastelands and then look round Hollywood, which is grubbier and dirtier than we expected, and I find Marilyn's hands like in one of my poems. Unlike Traci my hands aren't made to fit, my fingers are too short and stumpy, and my feet are way too big. Mary Pickford's hands fascinate me, her hands and feet are like the prints of a doll- tiny and perfect. I am glad I wrote my poems before I came, since the idealism and hope of the teenage girl narrator wouldn't have been present if I'd been here and seen just how dirty and smoggy the place was. The narrator in the poems hasn't been there either yet, she thinks it will be beautiful.

It is more expensive in LA than anywhere else we have been. I haven't been impressed by there being nothing to see between anywhere (the freeways are lined with high concrete walls.) Everything being so far apart means there is more time spent getting to places than time there. But I decide to give the place the benefit of the doubt, and admit that maybe I'd have felt differently and enjoyed LA for what it is if it hadn't been the last stop on a visually breathtaking trip. As if was, it was the visual equivalent of going from the bahamas to grimsby. As for tinsel town? What a let down, nothing sparkly in sight.


While I am here I feel fat, everyone around me is so much thinner than me, and I start to think about how much weight I've put on. Time to think of that the day after tomorrow when I will be home, all the way there I will think- I have done it. I actually went. No one is more amazed than me.I hope I won't forget, and that just having been somewhere changes me.

New food tried (for the last time): Jalpeno cheese corndog
Verdict: Too much pastry, needs more cheese and pepper, but I can feel my arteries clogging even remembering it.

Falling asleep to: South Park