Scottsdale Arizona actually, but I had never heard of Scottsdale until we booked this trip. It's right beside Phoenix, basically part of the same big metropolis. By the way, the picture isn't Scottsdale, it's Palm Springs!
Anyway, we started the day in Los Angeles - they picked up our suitcases at 7am and we had to be on the bus at 8am. This was our first real chance to meet our fellow travellers. As I gathered would be the case, most are from England. Three other Australians - all from Victoria - a few Americans, two South Africans, two from Wales, and a Canadian. Two of the Ozzies are a couple from a farm (I gather) in Victoria - and they're having a grand holiday - an Alaska cruise, a Cosmos tour around the Rockies and that part of Canada, this tour, and then over to the east coast for another one. Quite a few of the English people are on their second Cosmos tour in a row as well. So far, a nice bunch of people. I was a little surprised by the age range though. I thought it would be mostly oldies like us - and there's a fair few of us - but there are also some younger (like, in their twenties) girls and guys, and quite a few teenagers travelling with parents. Youngest is about 13.
We headed off to Beverley Hills - which we just drove through - and then Hollywood which we had a chance of a quick look around on foot. Not enough time for any official tours, and to be honest I don't think I missed all that much. To me it was the kind of place where I could have done lots of things if I was there for a while, but that I wouldn't go out of my way to see.
After that, we went to Palm Springs where we stopped for lunch. Just to give you an idea of how enormous the portion sizes are here - I had a half-size Waldorf Salad. The Tour Director said that a full size one would be too big for anybody and boy was she right - it was delicious but I only got about a third of the way through the halfsize one! It was hot in Palm Springs - about 100 degrees F today, which felt pretty hot to me but is nowhere near as hot as it gets there.
Next was basically 5 hours of freeway through the desert to Scottsdale. Not much exciting to look at along the way. It's apparently rainy season in Arizona - the tour director said that they get between 2.5 and 4 inches of rain a year, almost all in August. I still don't think there's a huge risk that I'll actually get rained on.
First impressions of the tour - Tour Director is a nice lady who seems prepared to go out of her way to help, within the confines of her company rules of course which - like on a cruise - are always encouraging you to spend money. The bus driver is from somewhere else in the USA and I don't think he had ever been to LA before, so he had a bit of a challenge but nostly managed okay. Nice comfortable bus. There won't be any fights over seats as they basically decide where each couple/ group will sit each day.
All good so far apart from the fact that I'm definitely catching a cold - hope it's not as nasty as the one I caught the only other time I was here. That one actually turned out to be a flu in the end, I got post-viral syndrome afterwards which took about 6 months to recover from, and in the process discovered that I have leukaemia :-( This one can't be that bad!!
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