Road Trip USA and Canada 2010

January 30, 2010:

Day 1 in LA. No time to waste! I had a long list of interesting RV's from Craigslist, ebay and other online advertisers. At 9 in the morning we went off for our first round of inspections. The GPS receiver  I had brought fromAustralia for use with my laptop works really well, so navigation in LA is no biggie. Traffic however is! Highways with up to seven lanes in each direction, unbelievable. First job is to organize a physical address in LA. No problem at all, you take your passport and go to see the nice guy at the Mail Service centre on Santa Monica Boulevard and ten minutes later you're done. Brilliant!
Thanks to our lovely landlady Jennifer we already had our HSBC debit cards, so the next step is to buy a mobile phone and try to get a reasonable plan for mobile broadband. The first is easy, the second pretty much impossible. Even after offering to pay upfront for the service for 9 months we could not get the desired 5GB a month at $60. Best we achieved in the end was a prepaid 1 GB from virginmobile. Oh well, what the heck, at least we could activate our debit cards. So, on we go to see motorhome vendors, yay, finally! On Saturday we see 2 dealers, not too impressive. Jet-lagged as we are, we decide to call it quits for the day and return to our flat.