Next door to Santa Monica beach is Venice Beach, which plays the hippie dropout cousin to Santa Monica’s staid respectable member of society. They share the same vast sandscape, the same lines of waving palm trees, and to be honest, the same waves of homeless people. But Venice has the street performers on its boardwalk,…

Let’s leave the beach and head into the western heart of LA, 15 miles away. On the way we pass another city that’s separate the the City of Los Angeles – one you may have heard of… Very plush. The stars live in big houses far from the road, here and in the hills to…

After three nights, it’s time to move on. I’d love to tell you more about what happened in Vegas, but you know what they say… So it’s onto the short flight to sprawling Los Angeles, the second biggest city in the nation, with 11 million people in the city and 18 million in the urban…

Caesars Palace, synonymous with what we think of as Vegas – iconic boxing showdowns, Celine, mega-resort-casinos on the Strip. A stop on the new railroad out of LA at the turn of the 20th century, a gambling town that grew when thousands of single men moved down to build the nearby Hoover Dam in the…

The Piazza San Marco in Venice is one of the glories of Renaissance Italian architecture and design, and an immortal testament to the power of the Venetian Doges. The Campanile of St Mark’s Church dates back to the 12th Century. All these facts are true. But this isn’t Venice. And the Trevi fountain in Rome…