Santa Monica
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This week has been brutally hot, at least by Los Angeles standards. And today was forecast to be about 110F again. So the Sunday bike club ride was a one-way trip to Santa Monica. It’s mostly downhill to the beach, and the beach is slightly less hot than here in Pasadena. So that was the plan.
In the past, we’ve done this route by taking Huntington into downtown L.A., but today I modified this so we started out by going down to East L.A. and Boyle Heights. This is also mostly downhill, but pads it out slightly to make the route longer. We also got to go over the new 6th Street bridge. After that, we went through downtown and down to USC before following the Metro Expo Line west. We stopped at Western Ave and got a couple gallon jugs of cold water to refill all our water bottles.
Continuing on, by the time we got on the Ballona Creek bike trail, we could feel it was getting to be slightly less hot, since we were just a few miles from the ocean at that point. In Marina Del Rey, we were all enjoying the (relatively) cool ocean breeze. The locals weren’t enjoying it, since it was still pretty hot by beach standards, but we thought it felt good. We rode by the canals in Venice, and then up Main St to our snack stop at Dogtown Coffee. We found out today that the coffee shop has a patio out back that we didn’t know about. So that was nice. After that, we rode the final mile or so to the Metro Station at 4th and Colorado in Santa Monica. The we got on the train to come home.
43 miles.
