Los Angeles and Pasadena, California, USA

We arrived in Los Angeles from Beijing on Air China Flight 983 at around 6pm (although our bodies were still operating on Beijing time at 8am). The flight was uneventful, and we were soon out of the airport and in the shuttle bus on the way to our hotel at Pasadena. The wedding dinner we had come to attend went very well the next evening in downtown LA, and over the next couple of days we enjoyed meeting our Singapore relatives again, and our new American in-laws for the first time. Then it was time to turn our attention to rental cars and itineraries for our looming road trip. We picked up a Pontiac at the car rental agency in Pasadena, stocked up with an esky and food and other essentials, and hit the freeway at 4pm, headed north towards our first stop, Yosemite National Park, a few hundred kilometres north of Los Angeles. We made two overnight stops on the way, at Bakersfield and at Oakhurst.