Long Beach bike ride

For a change of biking scenery, a bike-club friend and I drove down to Long Beach on Friday and did some biking on some of the pathways they have there.  Long Beach is at the south end of the city of Los Angeles.  They have quite a few bike paths down there.

This is taken from a bridge over one of the many marina areas:

 

In Los Angeles, I find bike paths are often located along flood spillways (is that the right word?), in industrial areas.  This is the Haynes steam plant, run by the L.A. Dept. of Water and Power:

  

Here's where two of the spillways converge, with the bike path running right alongside of it.  The photo doesn't do justice to how deadly a fall over that bank into the spillway would be- it's steep and deep, and would be very easy to fall in off the path if distracted.

  

There's a handy ramp for access down into the spillway, we went down and had a look:

  

Not much water in it right now, but there is some as it's been raining this month:

  

Looking the other way:

  

Alongside the spillway is a power corridor, and underneath it they've used the land for a plant nursery:

  

There are functioning oil wells along the bike path too (I know, it's not quite the nature experience one gets on an Ottawa bike path!  Interesting though!):

  

On our way from that bike path to the one that follows the ocean, we passed this tranquil (and deserted) little beach in an inlet, I think in the area called Naples:

  

Here's the big beach.  It's one of those huge wide beaches like the one that follows the west coast of Los Angeles:

  

Here's an island that's just offshore, there are a few of them out there.  Not sure what the structures on the island are:

  

Condos and buildings along the beach, close to the Long Beach downtown:

  

Here's part of the Long Beach port, looking into the setting sun so the photo isn't the greatest.  The port there is huge:

  

We also hiked a short nature trail at El Dorado park, stay tuned and I'll put up the photos from that in a separate post.