Checking out happened without incident, or much in the way of waiting, which was nice; Those queues get … impressive at peak times.
Then again, it’s a 4000+ room hotel complex, so perhaps that is to be expected.

I looked it up, and the hotel dates back to the early 90’s. I’d assumed that it was at least a decade od so older than that.

As is usual, I got to the airport ridiculously early, and could have been earlier if I’d raced to catch the shuttle which was there as I arrived at the lobby. I didn’t feel like that, so just sat around & chatted to folks who were also waiting until the next one came.

Airline check-in systems seem to have improved over the very few years I’ve been travelling.
For Holiday 2012, I could guarantee that the auto-kiosk would shit itself when I gave it my NZ passport, and I’d have to go to an actual check-in person. This time, they seem to cope fine, so I’m guessing that the e-passport rollout is going well.
I did get asked if I was OK, but that was because I was taking the time to read what was on the screen, and was possibly talking to myself as I did so. I got here, as did my luggage, so I guess I did it right.

The plane.
It all went a bit tits-up when the plane happened.
They’d oversold by 5 seats or so, and started calling for volunteers to be compensated with $300 and take a later flight.
I was sort of interested until they clarified that it was a $300 travel voucher, for United, at which point it became pretty damn useless to me. (United are a part of Star Alliance, which Air NZ is also a part of, but I don’t know whether the voucher would transfer to other airlines in the network, and I’m damn sure I wouldn’t be willing to trust them if they said it did. Plus, I had places to be)

They got a couple of takers at $300, then a couple more when they bumped it to $400.
Then, on the plane, they discovered that the off-duty pilot wasn’t rated for that aircraft, so couldn’t ride in the cockpit, so they had to find lucky volunteer number five, at $500, with the explicit threat that if they picked you to be bumped to a later flight, you’d get nothing. Someone went for it, and we eventually were able to leave, late, to wait 20 minutes or so for the next available take-off opportunity.

On the plus side, I got a window seat, which was nice; Las Vegas to Los Angeles is only an hour, so the plane never gets that high, and there was no cloud, so I got to see a whole lot of desolate landscape that I’d like to go and scuffle around in someday.
Maybe in winter?

At Los Angeles,  the first couple of shuttlebus wranglers were not interested in the base concept of Santa Monica as a place that people wanted to go to, and a taxi driver pointed me at a bus stop.
The next shuttlebus bod, from SuperShuttle, looked at the address & said “Yeah, we can do that, take a seat over there”, and proceeded to get me onto a shuttle after maybe 20-30 minutes. Granted, I had to type Andrei’s address into the driver’s GPS app myself, because he was busy driving, but I got here, pretty much door to door, for $29 including tip, which doesn’t seem so bad.

Cluttered up Andrei’s lounge with my suitcase, and we went to see a movie, as Inside Out was playing, in a newly-revamped cinema with fancy electric-operated recliners.