Santa Monica Boulevard is lined with car dealers offering great prices on second-hand sports cars. The credit crunch is obviously hitting California so hard that Hollywood execs are selling their daughters’ Porsches.

Bad news for local teens, but an excellent omen for visitors — the expensive end of America has suddenly become affordable. It’s a chance to have an impossible-sounding thing — a budget family holiday in California. The savings start right away at Los Angeles airport, despite protests from the teen elements in the party.

“Not hiring a car? In LA?” gasps my daughter, Lesley, 15, already sounding like one of the dispossessed Hollywood babes. “I bet you could get a Hummer really cheap here,” adds her helpful brother, Simon, almost 13.

No, we’re not hiring a car yet, because I know from past experience that you can see the best bits of LA without one. And, of course, parking is total hell. Or, rather, paying for parking.

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An off-street space anywhere near the Walk of Fame will cost at least £6.50. The cheapest hotel will charge £10 or £15 a night. In LA, you can spend as much on leaving your car unused as you do on hiring the blasted thing.

So we head for the $1.75-a-ticket airport shuttle, which takes us to Santa Monica in less than an hour and allows us to enjoy the LA street life without worrying about jet-lagging our way into a car crash. It’s lucky I’m not driving, because Lesley grabs my head and twists it skywards every time we see a giant mugshot of Zac Efron on a billboard for 17 Again.

We stay in Santa Monica, the perfect base in LA because it’s by the ocean, surprisingly well served by public transport, and feels like a real town, rather than a chunk of traffic jam. For our first three nights, I got a good advance deal at the friendly, motel-style Hotel California by phoning to ask if they could beat their online rate — which they did.

So we have a two-room suite, decorated with surfboards and guitars (all, unfortunately, screwed to the walls), with kitchen, for the equivalent of £135 per night. Not exactly cheap, but it’s 200 yards from Santa Monica’s pedestrian shopping zone and only one block back from the Pacific Ocean. We hit the beach, where surfers roll by on skateboards (or are they skateboarders carrying a surfboard?). Even the cops get into the act, cruising past on quad bikes, their Ray-Bans glinting in the reflection from their teeth.

We get to Venice and opt to eat at a beachside diner. I realise that it might be tough to make this a budget meal. American menus constantly tempt you to consume more — add extra toppings to your pizza for $1 each? On the other hand, American waiters don’t care a jot if one of your party fancies a poached-egg breakfast at 6pm, another has a bacon cheeseburger and two just want a smoothie each. And if you ask for tap water, you’ll get huge glasses, with unlimited and good-humoured refills.

Next day, I disappoint the kids a second time by revealing that we won’t be going to Universal Studios in a stretch limo. You can get there from Santa Monica by bus and underground with a $5 day pass. The moans of complaint are forgotten as soon as we board the bus. A punk girl is wearing a plastic skirt and tights that look like spider’s webs after a storm. A terrifyingly pale man, apparently a vampire on his way home to the cemetery, sits completely motionless for the hour-long trip.

Meanwhile, the bus driver, a formidable African-American woman who can only just fit behind her steering wheel, yells at anyone who fails to pay all of their fare, making a muscle-bound human pitbull whimper apologetically as he redeems himself with a 25c coin.

Things at Universal Studios are less gritty, but great fun nonetheless. The studio tour ferries visitors around in a sort of charabanc, past Hitchcock’s original Psycho motel, through a pond that is inhabited by a presumably freshwater Jaws shark and down the manicured street that is home to the Desperate Housewives, where the flowerbeds are as fake as a Californienne’s nose. The £45pp it costs for a day at Universal is good value — we “do” seven attractions and have photoshoots with the Simpsons, SpongeBob and Marilyn Monroe.

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