Bacheolor party = excuse to bike tour and…
My favorite Cousin, X-opher, had his Bachelor party down in Newport Beach over the weekend. To get there I had the choice of a 150mile drive on the interstates, and through LA traffic (At 3:30am on our way home there was a traffic jam… there is always something there). I certainly didn’t feel like driving both ways through LA traffic, and taking the train round trip seemed expensive. The next most logical step was bicycling 240 miles around LA. There were not convenient mid route stops, so I opted to borrow a Ibex trailer, and camping gear from Sam, screwed around packing and ended up leaving at the crack of 10 am.
The first part was mellow – 20km of bike path where I met up with 84 year young Richard Ryan and rode with him. After the bike path was a 20 km ‘death stretch’ of highway, literally one of the deadliest roads in the country for cars, and no shoulder for bicycles. I have to say that my guardian angel was looking out for me, because no more than 300m down the road and a friend Mark Henson drove past and offered me a lift to the next quiet side road (and I gladly bypassed the gauntlet).
Bypassing Taft my luck turned: I marveled as a roadside field was crop-dusted, and then coughed up lung-fulls of what was most likely roundup as the air was thick of it. My mouth and throat tasted bitter for the next 3h. Locals I later tal
ked to complain of chronic headaches (Ms Brockovich?).
Next there was Mad-Max like landscape strewn with oil derricks, followed by Marcopia, and nearly ghost-town. One of the few ‘open’ places was the ‘members only social club’. Grocer Grade was around 45 minutes, but slightly quieter, and from there I turned onto hwy 33 to Ojai, which had a car ever 5 minutes (mostly dirt-bikers) who soon turned off leaving me to the calm and beauty of Pine Pass. I’m only telling you this because of the contrast of the geographically quiet areas. Cars cheered me here, or slowed to give me thumbs up. The descent is fantastic, and frequently used for automobile commercials.
Around Ojai my late 
start began to haunt me as it got dark just before entering the urban- naval sprawl of Ventura. The moon was nearly full, shoulders decent, and I had lights 
so I rode on (at a good clip) for a few hours, stopping for supper of tabuli and a flat tire. At last I was into quieter areas, and I found a beach which was closed to cars from sundown to 8am, set up camp and was instantly asleep.
Once on the road to Malibu I rode with, and chatted to a group of 3 cyclists, then stopped at a Burrito Truck for breakfast. Every cyclist I saw stared at me, but only 2 of the hundreds waved back (including only one of the 3 I’d just been riding with). Even passing cyclists would ignore my ‘hello’s’ – this part of life on Southern California coast always irks me to no end – the ‘paradise’ snobbery.
Once in Malibu I was onto a network beachfront boardwalks – through Redondo beach and the Trump golf course. From there you enter San Pedro which degrades as it’s the LA shipping port – which is fine but the poorly marked California coastal bike route becomes lost in a web of bridges and trucking lanes. I thought I was doing fine until I found myself somehow cycling around the Port of Long Beach for 30 min. I could see where I wanted to go, but it was 4 train tracks, 2 sets of barb wire, Interstate 710 and a canal away. Eventually I gave up and followed the signs to ‘Downtown Long Beach’ which was an on-ramp, a short stretch on the interstate and I was in the ghetto (literally front yards are cordoned off with 10’ high chainlink fences) which gives way to sky scrapers and then once again pristine beaches. I always shake head (did that just happen?) and breath a sigh of relief. From there it’s on to Huntington beach and a pleasant bike path on to NewPort.
Now I like Newport, it’s off the PCH and once again strangers say hello. Which I like. Somehow I managed to get there a little late, and after 370km I was very sweaty, smelly, and now cold. I went to …. (which wasn’t open) banged on the door, and the bartender gave me a key to the apartment with instructions on finding towels and to ‘make sure the cat doesn’t escape’. Yeah I like the humanity of this place, what a breath of fresh air.
The next 36h are classified, no pictures exist – it was something between what my mother would be OK with and what Billy would be OK with.
I slept, and go for an hour barefoot run on the beach – do you realize that there is a gradeschool here whose playground is 
literally the beach, and a paved basketball court surrounded by sand! Cycled to the Train station and read Paul Coelho’s Veronika Decides to Die which is a really great book, the nut of it is questioning the logic about being normal. Alice thanks for introducing me to Coelho.
Chris and Mel – all the best see you soon.
