Fish Tacos?

So on Thursday morning I checked out of the Santa Monica Hostel for the last time and drove up to the North of LA County (which is a huge area, x square miles and y million people, of which Los Angeles and Hollywood and Santa Monica and Long Beach are all cities within LA County) where I had another meeting with a company. Suffice to say, this was one of the best yet, in terms of the insight I was able to get from a very helpful chap I'd met at a conference when I visited DC 2 years ago, and also he took me to lunch courtesy of the company. I had fish tacos, on Brandy's suggestion, which were very messy until I realised that you should eat them with cutlery!!



Not the actual tacos I ate...

After that I drove North, and inland, towards Palmdale where I was due to stay the night. I was now driving into the desert, and watched the thermometer on the car rise from about 78 up to 94 degrees F - no where near the hottest I saw, but it's amazing how much hotter it gets as you drive inland.
The Days Inn motel at Palmdale had a very pleasant pool and I got a nice room for a steal at just under $50 (thanks to Priceline website).



View from the room. Mostly desert!

 Sure, it wasn't as flash as the Hilton, but a bit more private than the Hostel and everything worked nicely. I had a dip in the pool and spent the rest of the afternoon catching up on 'admin', including some emails and a load of recent blog posts (hence the splurge a couple of days ago). Dinner for me was a Pizza Hut takeaway - I couldn't find anything else nearby that took my fancy and didn't really have the time to drive further away!

The pool. Quite difficult to swim lengths in.