Seeing as though June 28th (our departure date) seemed to be the peak of all summer travel everywhere (blacked out for every companion certificate I had, and fares appearing to be about triple what I usually see), getting to LAX was a bit difficult. Being the cheapskate I am, the idea of paying $600 for a roundtrip in Y to LAX with poor connection timing (either too short or way too long) simply would not work for me. I was able to find a reasonably cheap OW fare on WN, and booked it knowing that it would create some difficulty. First, it arrived approximately 12 hours prior to our departure, and 7 hours before the CZ desk opened. Second, any horrendous irrops would put us in a very bad situation. There was little I could do about the latter (other than creating an extremely long connection), and for the former it was decided that we would rent a car and cruise around the LAX area.
Flight 1: WN 428 STL - LAX
We did reasonably well at check-in time, being assigned A56 and B10 for boarding. My lovely wife selected two very nice exit row seats which provided ample leg room for the 4 hour flight.
One of the striking differences between my usual DL flights and this WN flight was the space in the overhead bins. This picture is at the END of boarding and there is a tremendous amount of space available.
The flight was uneventful, and we had a nice time talking to our seatmate who was a tour guide for trips to Thailand. The wife was wearing her "just married" top, and the flight attendant gave us a couple of free drinks which was a nice touch.
On landing we deplaned into the utter madness that is LAX and retrieved our bags as quickly as possible to head to the Avis lot. The Avis bus was incredibly crowded and slow but it got us directly to our car so I was a happy camper. We created an itinerary for LAX that consisted of two things: In N Out burger and Manhattan Beach. In N Out burger was delicious, although the parking/line situation were out of control. We arrived at nearly 1:30 PM and the drive-through line was choking off traffic to the street and the line was around the inside of the dining area. We took our orders to go (two animal style burgers and one neopolitan shake) and sat out on the grass near one of the runways.
Once we'd had our fill we set out down Sepulveda Boulevard towards Manhattan Beach. After a few wrong turns, we arrived, parked, and set out towards the beach to take in some of the scenery and snap a few pictures. The wife grabbed the DSLR and headed down the hill loving the scenery, only to quickly turn back around to ask me a simple question. "Why won't the camera work" My careful inspection (using the years of post-secondary education I have) led me to conclude that it wouldn't work due to the lack of a battery. It seems that my last-minute packing decision to ditch the camera bag had backfired. As it turns out, iPhones take fairly decent photos too..
We strolled a bit, but ultimately decided that the best course of action would be to find an electronics store nearby. Siri proved quite worthless here, as she kept directing me to camera shops and electronics stores in Hartford, CT which would be slightly too far for our timeline. A friendly coffee shop employee directed us to Fry's which was a couple of miles away. As it turns out, Fry's is some sort of hybrid between a MicroCenter (products sold and size) and a Trader Joe's (decor and general arrangement), but they had a battery that would work in my 12-year old DSLR so we got that as well as a much larger memory card.
On return, Manhattan Beach remained quite lovely, although there was a lot of mist in the air. We would later be told by a bartender that this was common this time of year, and was thus referred to as the June Gloom.
Plenty of surfers out enjoying the mild surf
All in all, Manhattan Beach was a pretty nice little beach town and we enjoyed our short stroll around there.
We enjoyed a couple of drinks at a nearby restaurant before heading back to LAX for check-in around 7:30. Check-in was uneventful, and we were invited to the wholly unimpressive KE lounge.
I had a shower, but have provided no pictures due to my general forgetfulness and the unremarkable nature of the lounge. Some small sandwiches and several beers consumed while waiting to board the next flight.