May 25, 2023 – Point Mugu State Park to Long Beach (home
Today’s ride ended up being about 77 miles from the Sycamore Canyon campsite to my house in Long Beach. The ride was pretty much segmented into three parts: Malibu (Highway 1), beaches with bike paths, and then back to Highway 1 (PCH) into Long Beach. We got into Los Angeles County pretty quickly and started heading down the coastline in Malibu. There was typically a shoulder here to ride on, but there are endless cars parked on it, so we had to swerve into the road pretty often. On top of the usual traffic and parked cars, it ended up being trash day which meant that the roads were lined with trash cans and a multitude of garbage trucks blocking the shoulders and right lane of the highway. We dealt with this segment for about 30 miles.
Next, we got to the “beaches with bike paths” section which consisted of Santa Monica, Venice Beach, Playa Del Rey, El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, and Redondo Beach. This section was about 20 miles and was great because it is the middle of the week and had relatively few pedestrians walking around. Large parts of the bike path were closed because they had been covered with sand, but they had a detour that still kept us off of the main roads. It had been years since I went to visit Santa Monica and Venice Beach, so it was nice to see that they had cleaned up both areas considerably. We cruised through these paths and enjoyed the escape from traffic.
Next we got back to PCH at the end of Redondo Beach and it took us through Torrance, Lomita, Wilmington, and Long Beach. Talk about nerve racking. This stretch was also about 20 miles, but was the most stressful (and probably most dangerous) part of this trip. We rode this part from about 2pm-4pm so traffic just kept getting worse and worse and we had no shoulder or bike lane until we had already gone through most of Long Beach. Other than Torrance and the last part of Long Beach, the rest was through pretty industrial areas, so lots of truck traffic and people rushing to get home that did not care for us taking up one of their lanes. We probably would’ve been better off taking a different route, but I’ve been trying to adhere to my book as much as possible and decided to go for it. Once we made it past the traffic circle in Long Beach, we finally got a bike lane for the last few miles of PCH for the day.
We took the San Gabriel Bike Path north from there and made it home tired, but safe. All in all I’m pretty proud of both of us for making this push in distance this week. We did 280 miles in 4 days; not bad for a couple of novice cyclists.
-Chris
P.S. Sorry for posting these last two updates so late, I got home and had plenty of things to catch up on. On that note, I decided to finish the trip next week. Only two days left, so in the end I decided that I might as well get some family time in, get rested, and then finish fresh. Look for an update/conclusion next weekend.
