MONDAY 4 APRIL 2016
BRENTWOOD TO MALIBU
1120 - 1800
Trip: 36.77 km (22.85 miles)
Av. Speed: 15.2 km/h (9.4 mph)
Max Speed: 54.5 km/h (33.9 mph)
Time on Bike: 2h 24m 51s
WATCH VIDEO!
Not having the initial stages of a big trip beset by problems is just not cricket.
As much as anyone would love to visualise the "perfect start", it never ever happens.
The most I ever hope for is the avoidance of complete catastrophe, which, when it all boils dry, is equally unfeasible as perfection.
What ends up happening is inevitably something in between.
So it came to be this time as well.
After faffing around for the best part of the morning, which involved fairly typical scenarios of misplacing any number of items, most of which I deemed absolutely necessary to start the trip (some actually were, to be fair...), I managed to get myself organised enough to eventually start rolling down the steep decline of Nth Kenter Avenue at 11.20 am.
Bound for Santa Monica Pier, I intended to make an official start from this point - the southern commencement of the Pacific Coast Highway (which will be referred to from this point on as "PCH"...) as my launching pad to the north.
Proceeding a mere 300 meters beyond the Peruchini residence, I noticed immediately my trip computer was not reading.
I pulled over outside Fergie's house and adjusted the sensor.
Another 150 meters, still nothing.
More fiddling, more nothing.
Then after about a 4th attempt, I fathomed to swing the sensor unit completely to the other side of the fork so that the sensor area was actually FACING the magnet.
Brilliant!!!
There was also the other technicality of running a newly purchased helmet camera from the top of the hill all the way down to Santa Monica.
Wishful thinking at worst and utterly stupendous if I actually managed to pull it off, I generally do enjoy making things as complicated for myself as possible whilst creating the conditions for as many things to go wrong as possible.
So with a newly-fangled piece of technology which I had little or no idea how to actually use, if rightly would have been a miracle for it to have.
Anyway, I digress and the good news is that I safely made it to the pier in one piece, with or without the accompanying technology.
The trip computer had already registered 10.39 km and it was pretty good riding.
Charles and I had completed a dummy run the previous day in the Prius to enable me to avoid the worst of L.A traffic on my heavily laden rig.
As romantic as it would have been to take Sunset Boulevarde all the way to the ocean, we decided against this due to the windy and at times narrow nature of Sunset. Not to mention that it also comes out about 3 miles north of the pier.
San Vicente seemed much more user-friendly, particularly with the presence of a designated bicycle lane and the relatively flat trajectory.
So this was it.
Santa Monica Pier was teeming in spite of it being a Monday.
An absolutely perfect spring day had people out in droves, perusing all the food outlets and amusements that are perpetually on offer at the Pier.
It did not take me long therefore to get myself into trouble with my articulated vehicle.
Santa Monica Pier is a maze of narrow steps and ramps and kerbs, all of which are fine if you are as most people were on Monday - on foot - then along comes me with my ambitious conveyance, clearly at odds with the generally congested environment and unlikely to negotiate the obstacles with any amount of grace.
Still, it did seem obvious how HEAVY and likely overloaded my whole kit was.
Even though I was presently asking it to do unreasonable things, neither bike nor trailer seemed entirely happy and therefore, nor was I.
From experience, these generally all qualify as "teething problems" and can be adjusted and tweaked along the way, which is what I planned on doing.
After several attempts to shoot a departure video at a couple of different locations around the Pier - (first imposed upon by a loudly buzzing air compressor, then by the uncanny arrival of a garbage truck at a second location which eventually backed up and moved on only to be replaced immediately by a busker with 2000-watt portable speaker shuffling through the tunnel at snail-pace, singing away in full-lung - the acoustics of the Pier's tunnel amplifying the distorted noise about 10-fold from the 100+ dB already pumping out of the speaker)
Perhaps it was going to be one of those days...??
25 minutes later, I stole a moment to punch my video out and move on before Formula 1 arrived spontaneously for a Santa Monica "meet the people" open day....
I made my way briefly back onto Ocean Avenue, before hooking right and dropping down onto the PCH.
Away I went!
First stop was to be at the Getty Villa, having pre-booked a ticket for 1 pm.
Even though it was already 10 past, I was hoping they would accept my raft of excuses which surely would have included "bike problems", garbage trucks and hearing-impaired buskers.
Pulling into the Getty Villa then at just after 1.30 was a fair return I thought.
Even I would have accepted my own excuses on these terms.
As it was, they didn't even ask.
I was shuttled from the bike racks to up to the villa where I spent the next 3 hours or so, perusing the artefact collection of the late J.Paul Getty.
Mr Getty's primary passion, amongst other things, was ancient Greece and Rome.
If I'd paid more attention at school, I'd have probably known more about this stuff beforehand.
As it is, I still can't get overly interested in the archaeological origins of western civilisation, particularly when we have an Australian aboriginal culture that pre-dates all the items on display in the Getty Center by literally thousands of years.
I'd decided after about an hour that there were only so many marble busts and bronze or terracotta pots I could look at, so decided to go outside for some photo opportunities and then upstairs for some lunch.
It was close to 4.30 by the time I was shuttled back down to the bike racks where I saddled up and made way for a 6 pm arrival in Malibu.
 |
THE GETTY VILLA (SANS WATER FEATURE DUE TO DROUGHT IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA) |
No comments:
Post a Comment