Bike ride to the Pacific Ocean

I headed out on my bike today to bike to the beach. It was hazy when I set out, so I didn't take my camera this time.

By the way, I must mention that I don't find air quality here to be too bad at all so far. I've seen worse in Toronto. The air is not completely clear, but that's a moisture thing as much as (or more than) a pollution thing, since the city (or the part I'm in, anyway) is in a basin surrounded by mountains on 3 sides and ocean on the fourth, so the air gets trapped here. It's also more humid here than I had counted on (darn!), but nothing like Ottawa, still bearable. And yes, it is very much still summer here! Beautiful weather, never brutally hot, and cool (but not that you'd need a jacket) in the evenings and at night.

When we have bad air in Ottawa, I can feel it in my lungs, and I haven't felt like that here yet. I'm sure it does happen, but so far so good, at least bad air days aren't an everyday occurrence. I also don't have any allergies here- I was worried that I might since the plants would be different from back home (I did 4 years of allergy shots in Ottawa that worked so I don't have allergies there either), that maybe I'd be affected by something here, but so far so good on that too.

Anyway, back to the bike ride. I set out hoping to find a bike path that follows one of the "rivers" here, the river being a concreted-over drainage ditch.

I did find the path, but couldn't find a way to get down to it anywhere! So I ended up on some very pleasant residential streets in Culver City (a west LA neighborhood), but those eventually came out onto Venice Blvd, which has a bike lane, so since that had been my plan B I figured I'd better take that rather than risk getting lost on my first outing. LA is a grid city though, so it's hard to get completely lost.

I found the bike lane to be great, and the motorists very respectful (it's a shared parking/bike/right hand turn lane), no close calls or homicidal vibes at all. However, Venice Blvd. is just plain ugly! Six lanes wide, plus the cycling lane in each direction, and lowbrow commercial the whole way (the kind with parking lots out front), with some pockets of residential.

It's a great route in terms of being direct (and long, it runs from the ocean almost to downtown), but I am going to have to find a better route for aesthetics. I had chosen a pleasant route on the way to the bike path I couldn't get onto, and there are no doubt other routes like this. My own street (Hauser Blvd.) seems good this way, it's pretty, mostly residential, traffic not too insane, and it has lights at the major intersections. LA seems to have lots of semi-residential routes like this, it's just a matter of finding them, so I will work on that.

So, at the beach (it was Venice Beach I ended up at due to the Venice Blvd. route) I stood in the ocean for a few minutes and watched the surfers, and then headed back. It was 38 km round trip (that said, I took an indirect route there as I was hunting for that path) and 2h 15min of biking.

The beach path looks great, but I didn't bike much of it today as I'd already been on the road an hour once I got there. The beach path is incredibly long, follows the beach the whole way from Santa Monica down the coast to the bottom of the city.

On my return to the apartment, it was fun watching the altimeter on the bike computer shoot up as it passed each floor.