Anaheim to Los Angeles (36 miles, about 43mins)

We got up smoothly and checked out of the hotel. We found that, despite warnings about residents parking being expensive; the bill was free of any such charge. We breakfasted on the way at the same Mexican doughnut shop and relied on sat-nav to return us to the Howard Johnson hotel where we had spent our first night of the odyssey, actually only ten days before but many miles and experiences in the past. We were confident that the hotel was close to the Dollar car depot and we would find our way between them easily. As it happened the run across LA was painless and we picked up signs for rental car return before we reached the hotel so I disassembled the sat-nav confident that the £42 spent on eBay for the USA card had been money very well spent but from now on the driving and navigation could be left to professionals. The return process at Dollar was as efficient as it could be, a quick visual inspection of the car, think counting the wheels as a guide to time taken, a scan of our documents and we were queuing for the courtesy bus to the airport.
Anyone who has been adding up the time and mileage which labels the chapters, or am I the only one sad enough to do that, will find that we had travelled 1357miles in about 31hours. All of the driving was done by Julia, I never got behind the wheel but I translated the sat-nav and navigated diligently throughout the journey. We reckon with our detours, added trips and sat-nav foibles we may have approached 2000miles in total but perhaps that’s on the large side. We had enjoyed the vast majority of it and will repeat this type of thing in the future, there are after all another 40+ states to tackle. Perhaps next time we will be more independent and only book flights and car-hire in advance allowing overnight stops as and when we fancy them.
The courtesy bus dropped us outside the American Airlines terminal and we checked in on the pavement, encountering a potential problem of baggage allowance. The international allowance to the states is generous, as much as a pack mule could carry, and that had applied to us from London to LA but now we were LA to New York which came under internal regulations. The check in staff kept saying “fifty or fifty!” as they threw bags onto the scales. Bags over 50lbs were to be reduced or charged $50 – we escaped either fate as we were, for us, travelling quite light. By the time we entered the terminal we had been relieved of our bags and were in possession of our boarding cards. We set off purposefully towards the security gates.