Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Being retired, we have been spending a lot of time at our house at Lake Arrowhead. We’ve been going up there during the week all year. But this time, we were up in the mountains on Tuesday evening when I got a message from Lulu that there was a fire starting near home. She sent me a picture of flames visible over Pasadena High School, which is just a few blocks from our house. An hour later, the evacuation order came in. We were already evacuated, but that was just happenstance, and we were sort of trapped there, unable to even know what was happening.

The next day, Lulu was able to get back into the neighborhood to see what had happened. As it turned out, three houses on our block burned, as well as our next-door neighbor’s garage. We came back on Thursday to pick up some supplies from the house, since we weren’t there when the evacuation order came through. So we had to come back to get all the items we would have grabbed on the way out the door. Our house smelled very smoky, and there was water and dirt on the laundry room floor from the firefighters dousing the back of our house to prevent it from catching fire while the neighbors’ garage burned.

I came back again on Sunday the 12th to try and piece the broken gate back together. It’s pretty far gone, but I figured I could patch it up enough to be functional for a little while. Still, I cant complain, since I built that gate a bit over 20 years ago.

We came back from the mountain on the 16th and started some cleanup inside the house. We wiped down the walls in the living room, dining room, and hallway. We also damp-mopped all the wood and linoleum floors. And finally, we washed all the towels and bedding in the house. All of those things brought the smoke smell (relatively) under control.

I like to think we have interesting adventures living here, but this is definitely in the category of adventures we’d probably not miss if it hadn’t happened.

It’s not generally well-known that we have the Wende Museum in Culver City, which is a museum dedicated to the history of the Cold War. And because of the Wende Museum, we have the largest piece of the Berlin Wall outside of Germany. It’s on Wilshire Blvd, across the street from Hancock Park and the tar pits, and it’s just a few blocks from Park La Brea and the Jessica Cafe inside.

The day started out cold, but it warmed up nicely. So it was a good day for riding.

45 miles.

Route map and elevation profile

It’s the Sunday before Halloween, and time for our annual “Down for the Count” ride. This is a trip to Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City to visit Bela Lugosi’s grave. This was one of the first themed rides we ever did, back in 2007.

One the way out, we stopped briefly in Exposition Park to see the progress on the Oschin Space Center building. The rest of the ride to Culver City was pretty straightforward, aside from a flat tire on the way out and one on the way back. We stopped in at Grand Casino Bakery for drinks and snacks. It was a perfect day for riding.

56 miles

Route map and elevation profile

This week we heard that the Big Boy statue in front of their Downey restaurant was mangled in a car crash, the restaurant painted him green and put some foam brains spilling out of his broken head. So that was the ride destination for this Sunday. We also had heard yesterday that the Columbia space museum in Downey was moving a full-sized model of the Space Shuttle for display at the museum. So we figured we’d go by there and see if it was parked there.

The route was our standard route for doing south to Downey. We stopped briefly at the oldest operating McDonald’s. They have a little museum there about the history of the company, and also, they have bathrooms. Then we went a bit farther south to the Columbia museum, but there was no sign of the shuttle model. Then we went for snacks at 3rd St Coffee in downtown Downey. Then straight home, basically by the same route we took to get there.

43 miles.

Route map and elevations profile

It’s been about a month since we went to see the Childless Cat Ladies Art Project in Burbank, so I thought we should go back and see if they’d added more to it. So that was the ride today, along with a plan to go through Griffith Park and see where the city closed off a stretch of Griffith Park Blvd to cars.

When we got there, we saw that there were indeed a few new pieces up on the fence, including a kitty asking not to be eaten. Heh.

There’s still about a month to go before the election, so I think we’ll have to go back one more time

43 miles.

Route map and elevation profile

46 miles.

Route map and elevation profile

A few days ago, there was an item on the local TV news about an artist in Burbank who decided to make a pop-up art project dedicated to the ‘Childless Cat Ladies’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlZhvjMUw10

So, of course my instant thought was, “we need to go see this!” So that was the bike club ride for today.

It was a very nice day for riding. The heat wave of the last few weeks had broken, and I actually needed a little Hoover Blanket under my jersey to be warm when we started out. Nice problem to have in August.

Route map and elevation profile

The big entertainment news this week was that Norman Lear died. He was a major force in TV back in the 1970s, so I thought a visit to the TV Hall of Fame in North Hollywood would be a good ride for the bike club this week.

We rode out there by a somewhat roundabout way. We stopped for snacks at Priscilla’s in Toluca Lake, and then rode the the TV Academy building in NoHo. It’s a testament to Norman Lear’s influence that Archie and Edith Bunker are the statues in the center of the garden there. Norman Lear is one of the busts of famous producers and other TV luminaries, and even Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of television.

46 miles.

Route map and elevation profile

Today’s bike club ride was a visit to the park in West Covina with the full-sized model of an F-86 fighter jet in the playground. We’ve been here before, but it’s been a while, and I wanted a route that headed east for this week.

It was a nice day for riding. A bit cool at first, but promised to warm up nicely. The ride out was fairly standard. We were treated to an impromptu lowrider car show along the way. Apparently there was some sort of lowrider event happening at the Irwindale Speedway, and a bunch of them passed us on the way there, and when we rode by, we looked into the parking lot and saw it going on.

The stop at the park was a chance for a few photos, and also a bathroom break. Then we headed over to Panera for snacks and drinks. By now it was a nice day, and the ride home was very pleasant, aside from a couple flat tires.

40 miles.

Route map and elevation profile

A couple weeks ago, the Saturday Foothill group did the ride to see the Brady Bunch house. On the way there, I saw that someone had recreated the Holodeck 9 control panels in North Hollywood Park. This had happened before, back in 2020. So today’s ride was to go there and see if they had made all four panels again and how they were different.

We rode out out usual route to Burbank and then took the Chandler bike trail over to North Hollywood. We had snacks and drinks at Groundwork Coffee, and then we rode to North Hollywood Park. And four of the irrigation control boxes had new stickers on them with holodeck controls. One panel had a list of available simulations to run, which were all based on movie storylines. Another showed the bounds of the simulation, along with a warning that the simulation might be erratic outside those bounds. All in all, it was pretty entertaining.

Riding home through Toluca Lake, we heard some very loud crashing noises coming from the 134 freeway. We pulled over on a side street with an overpass, and we saw that there had just been a multi-car crash on the freeway. Yikes.

45 miles

Route map and elevation profile