To Los Angeles via breathtaking Pacific Coast Highway

Having heard local after another praising the coast, we decided to change our driving route from San Francisco to Los Angeles to go through the glorified Pacific Coast Highway. We, however, pretty quickly realized a major bug in our plans. We had reserved only one day for the whole way down from San Francisco. According to Maps the route was going to take more than ten hours of straight driving, not to mention the breaks. To deal with this, we decided to refund our last night of the San Francisco Hostel, which later on turned out to be a great choice as we came to realize how horrible the place was, and instead decided to bunk one night at a motel halfway down the trip.

Early Saturday morning we crawled out of our beds to head south, most of us still winded from the previous fun evening. As we now had two days to spend for the travel, we decided to have Gilroy Premium Outlets as our first stop. The group’s shopaholics got crazed, whilst some of us parked themselves to the mall’s Starbucks for a good few hours. With cars full of shopping bags we started to approach the coast. We had heard good things about The Seventeen Mile Drive, thus we set our sights to Pebble Beach. After convincing the park officials to consider our Transits as cars rather than buses, we finally saw the first sights of beautiful white sand. The place completely threw us off. The peaceful atmosphere, the thriving golf courses and the endless sea. We laughed about moving there once we retire.

We kept driving south towards our accommodation in San Luis Obispo. The scenery on the route was just magnificent. The pictures speak for themselves. One thing that we didn’t know to expect were the altitude differences. On top of having to keep depressurizing your ears, the sceneries it creates are beautiful. Additionally it gets a little bit scary once in a while when route goes through steep slopes, having a wall of rock on the other side, and a huge drop right next to the windows.

On the second day of the trip we had some more free time - and there is no better place to spend it in than Santa Barbara. During the project it had almost constantly been almost unbearably hot, so it was no wonder people were enthusiastic about getting to the beach. Even though we used sunscreen abundantly, there was no stopping of us white-as-snow Finns getting burnt. A dauntless group of our guys decided to go play beach volley. Only to come back minutes later humbled by the weather. The sand was just too hot to survive in without anything to protect one’s feet.

Just as we were about to continue the drive some of us stumbled upon a baseball batting cage, one just like in the movies. Our departure suffered a slight delay due to it being hard to get the last guys and girls out of the cage... Once we got on the road, we learned the hard way that driving to Los Angeles from Malibu on a Sunday evening is quite a popular pastime. On the bright side, we now had lots of time to admire the grandiose homes the local millionaires had built on the hills!

After two days on the road, we finally arrived in Los Angeles on Sunday evening. Hot weather and two AirBnB apartments were waiting for us. Even though we had prepared ourselves for the huge size of the city, the distances and especially long driving times came as surprise. The L.A. city doesn’t have one central area and for that reason, interesting parts of the city are spread out around the region. On Monday morning, we started our day in Hollywood. Los Angeles is famous for its entertainment business and Hollywood has been the hot spot of film industry especially in the 20th century.  The greatest shine of the city has already gone but there are still many interesting pieces of history left. After walking along the Walk of Fame and checking the Chinese Theater, we jumped into our cars and drove to Hollywood hills. There was a great view to Hollywood sign and a good opportunity to take the mandatory group pictures with the sign.

For the evening, we had reserved tickets to the local baseball match. Los Angeles Dodgers were playing against San Francisco Giants at Dodger Stadium. For most of us, this was the first time in a baseball game and we didn’t know what to expect. The atmosphere at the stadium was great but soon we noticed that the game is really going to take long. The sport has a very slow tempo and it started to be challenging to maintain the focus in the game after the first few innings (rounds). After nine innings the game was tied and we realized it’s not going to end before one team will more runs than the other in a single inning. After 13 innings we had to give up and leave the stadium. At the apartment we saw that Dodgers had won the game 5-4 in the 14^th inning. The game had lasted 5:29 hours. Besides the match itself the show was very entertaining and our party even got on the big screen in front of 40,000 spectators and was welcomed by the announcer! Our hats might have had something to do with that.

On Tuesday, we woke up early and headed towards our final excursion. The Finnish in-content advertising platform Kiosked has their office near Venice beach where they have moved about two years ago. One of the firm founders, Antti Pasila, clarified us the business environment in L.A. and told the growth story of Kiosked. We felt us very welcomed and it was great to see behind the scenes of one highly successful startup from Finland. In addition to entertainment business, L.A. is well-known as a diverse concentration of popular publishers. Combined with the growing market and lower competition compared to San Francisco and Silicon Valley, it is a good location for marketing businesses. From the Kiosked office, we moved to nearby Venice beach for the rest of the day. Venice beach is popular from its waterfront boardwalk where a great variety of merchandisers have their own stalls and performances. It was easy to spend the time by enjoying the sun, surfing and checking the legendary gym of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Everything official completed, we now had a few days just for leisure. More about that in the next post!