Santa Cruz

Our muscles ached the following day. We got the Greyhound bus from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, which took about three hours. We were going there to meet Kayla, Jen's brother's girlfriend who lives there. Megabus is better than Greyhound. It stops less and is overall a quicker journey. However, the good wifi and leather seats made up for this! Because of our late arrival at the bus stop in Vegas, we allowed plenty of time (maybe too much time) and arrived 1hr30 before our departure time. Anyway, once we arrived in Santa Cruz we were pleasantly surprised with being greeted by Kayla's mum, Karen, who straight away took us in her car to her house. She told us to make ourselves at home while she went to pick Kayla's younger brother, Ryan, up from school. We eventually made a cup of tea and a sandwich. She returned home and asked whether we wanted to do any washing, which was very kind, so we combined some washing and put a load on. Once Kayla arrived home, the four of us got in the car and drove to the Redwoods forest. The trees are massive and really resistant to fire and sort of heal themselves as they grow. We went inside a Redwood tree called the 'Fremont Tree'. The hole was really small and it was dark inside so we used torches. It was quite cool seeing inside and you could stand up and look up into the trunk of the tree. We then walked around the forest. Apparently when it gets wet in winter 'banana slugs' come out. They are exactly as they are named: yellow with black patches and are very noticeable.

Afterwards, the sun was going down so we drove to the beach and watched the sunset. It was really pretty and the sky was pink and orange. I feel like I've see a lot of lovely sunsets on this trip! Kayla's mum was very kind and bought us and her family a burrito from a Mexican place in town for dinner. We went back to her house and ate it and chatted with the family. We met Kayla's father when he came home from work and we showed the family photos of our travels and they showed us photos of when Kayla went to England. We didn't realise, but the time was getting later and later and at 10pm we whizzed to the inn we were staying at after Kayla had backed up our photos of our travels on a USB for us. It was really nice being in a house after being in hostels and campervans and we had a great time. We went to the Torch Lite Inn and they made sure we were okay in our room. We were fine and had a decent night's sleep. In the morning we ate some breakfast and walked into downtown Santa Cruz. We sat and had a coffee near where we'd got a takeaway the previous night. There was a guy cycling up and down the street on a unicycle playing a guitar which we found quite amusing!

Our bus journey was loooooong. We left at 1:30pm and arrived in LA at about 11pm. We took a bus, a train and a shuttle to the airport. Then we arrived at the wrong terminal and ended up chatting to a security guard from Ghana, who had travelled the world, lived in London for ten years and every year returned to the UK. He kept saying how great it was we were travelling to all these different places. Anyway, we went to the right terminal, which was about 200m away, checked in and hung around for a little while. Luckily the connection at Panama was very short (45mins), so once we got off one flight we hoped on the other one. The journey was made worse by the fact that I had all of a sudden got a cold and felt awful, blowing my nose every five seconds. I slept a bit, but I was looking forward to arriving in Lima that night and having a good, long night's sleep!