Category: Our West Coast Journey

Day 40 – Carlsbad State Park – 102 km
Our last night on the road. Tomorrow we’ll be in San Diego. We’ll mark the official end of our journey with a 20 mile ride to the Mexican border the day following.

I’m glad this odyssey is coming to an end. The last week we’ve been pushing hard to make San Diego for Sophie’s deadline – a flight booked to Mexico City. Making that deadline sucked all the time out of our days for lingering anywhere. We’ve been riding past endless stretches of beach for the past week and haven’t once been in the ocean. I’ll make up for that in San Diego, where I have four days to relax before flying home.

Over the past six weeks I’ve been struck by how beautiful and varied the Paciffic coast of this country is. From rain forests to redwoods, vast expanses of planted fields to desert hlls, wild rocky coastline and crashing waves to sunny beaches and rolling surf. Just the public beaches alone leave me amazed. I used to think Vancouver had impressive beaches. The massive beaches of LA dwarf our piddly strands. I’ve discovered the mythic SoCal beach culture is very real and not just a creation of Hollywood and holiday marketers, as I had thought.

Yesterday we arrived in Huntington Beach to an airshow provided by US Navy pilots. Jet fighters screamed overhead in all directions trailing smoke and producing the most gut-felt roaring noise I’ve ever experienced. They made passes 100 feet off the ground, slowing to a speed that seemed impossible for flight, and then suddenly full-throttling it, making the ground shake with the roar of their engines. It was a naked display of military macho, to make the crowds gathered at Huntington Pier and beach proud of their country and the lethal power of its weapons. It really was impossible to not be impressed. These aircraft come as close to “god-like” power as anything I’ve ever seen.

Day 41 – San Diego – 55 km

We positioned ourselves for an easy ride into San Diego today. Although it was shorter, somehow it didn’t feel any easier. Every hill is still an effort to climb. And there were more of them than we’ve seen in the past few days.

Arriving in San Diego at 2:30 on a Monday afternoon I was stunned by how quiet the downtown area of this city is. There was no traffic on the roads and ridiculously few people walking about. It was as you might expect on a national holiday. All around us were office towers that I had to imagine were filled with people as there was little evidence of any human presence anywhere. Such a contrast with San Francisco and the many cities of the LA corridor. We virtually owned the downtown streets as we road to our hostel.

My roommates in my four-bed room include two friendly young guys from Finland who’ve been exploring Southern California by car for the past ten days, and a blonde, Scandi-looking guy who hasn’t said a word and avoids eye contact. More than that, he seems intent on avoiding any kind of social contact by going to bed later and getting up earlier than any of us others. In the cafeteria I watched as he kept his face stuck in his ipad for at least an hour, not once looking up or acknowledging anyone else. I have to wonder if I should be worried. Until I’ve had some intereraction with this guy I’m tempted to think my bunk mate (he’s sleeps above me) might be an axe murder or a white supremecist plotting his revenge on liberal society.

Day 42 – San Diego/Mexican Border.  40 km

We left the hostel after breakfast for our last ride of this long journey, to the border. However, finding our way out of the city and onto a bike-friendly route south for our last 40 km ride was a challenge. For such a placid, unhurried, uncrowded place, San Diego is complicated. Or at least its road system is.

When we found ourselves still consulting maps and Google outside of Aunt Emma’s Pancake House at 11:00 I suddenly realized how hungry I was, and how perfect a lunch of pancakes would be. But as we dawdled with maps, etc. I watched a stream of customers going into the place and discovered we’d have to wait 20 minutes for a table. I swallowed hard and we decided to bike on.

For the next 30 km I scanned every strip mall we passed for any sign of a pancake place. I was absolutely fixed on the idea. Tacos, hamburgers, Subway sandwiches – all were readily available, but I wanted something sweet. Specifically pancakes.

On arriving in San Ysidro – the US town bordering Mexico – I was hopeful. The place was like a massive shopping mall featuring every conceivable US franchise, except for a pancake house. By this time I was hypoglycemic and getting irrational. Sophie suggested alternatives, but I couldn’t accept eating anything savoury. We found there was a Starbucks at the end of a long line of fashion stores and I allowed that I might be able to stomach coffee and a muffin. As we rode the short distance toward the Starbucks I looked across the massive mall parking lot and, like a miracle, a god-send, an epiphany, I saw the magic word on the side of a building in the distance. Pancakes. International House of.  If I were a religious person, I might say something like my prayers were answered – but, by IHOP?  Needless to say the meal barely lived up to expectations.  But what a moment.

 

 

We had a similarly underwhelming experience at the “border.” We didn’t actually get anywhere near to the border. You can’t do that without committing to crossing it. We didn’t want to take the time, so we settled on having our photo taken by a passing security guard with a gigantic Mexican flag flapping in the wind over the border, in the distance behind us.

And thus ended our epic bicycle journey. We slung our bikes into an SD Metro trolley and returned to the city  like regular people, no pedalling involved.

Both Sophie and I find ourselves swept by a mix of feelings at reaching the end.  I want to give some time to reflecting on those before my  next post.

Day 43 – San Diego
I spent the morning making arrangements for shipping two bikes home and equipping myself with duffel bags large enough to contain the camping gear and clothes we used on our trip. Sophie and I go in different directions from here. She goes south to Mexico City tomorrow with her boyfriend Joe, who arrived in San Diego last night. I fly home to Vancouver on Saturday, emburdened with our bike stuff. It all leaves me feeling a bit melancholic, this abrupt change from our structured routine over the past six weeks – grinding away the miles to get here. Living day by day, out in all weather and travelling at the speed of a fast run. I’ve been calling it living life at human speed, because you surrender the ability to do anything faster than can be done on a bike. It’s interesting to live that way – at least for a time. Nothing goes by without your having the time to take it in, process, ponder and reflect on it. Not least because there’s nothing else really to occupy your mind as you grind down the road – apart, that is, from where and when you’ll eat next and where you’ll wind up for the night.

My bike computer shows 3045 kms as our total distance covered since we left Vancouver. That corresponds almost exactly to the distance in miles shown by this signpost at the Santa Fe Metro Station in downtown San Diego. However, we actually rode to the border 30 miles south of that sign, and also pedalled a lot of “sideways” miles for things like groceries. Hmm… I love the correspondence between the sign and my odometer, so i’ll just ignore the likelihood that my bike computer isn’t entirely accurate.

Now that our journey is done, I suspect this will be the last of my blog posts. But before signing off I need to acknowledge what many people suggested about this enterprise from the beginning – that it would be a great “bonding experience” for me and my daughter.  Spending six weeks with Sophie on the road meant experiencing a lot of good times and fun stuff, but also some “tricky” times, when the wrong word or tone of voice could raise the temperature between us signficantly. But we also know each other well enough to dial things down again when we need to.

A trip like this is not easy – we had to deal with all kinds of weather, dodgy roads, bad drivers and cruel climbs, but we did it together and it was all made much easier and greatly more satisfying by being a shared experience.

I especially want to credit Sophie for signing on for this trip. When she agreed to it many months ago, I know she didn’t really understand what would be involved. I think the furthest she had ever cycled prior to our departure was 25 km, and probably not more than twice. During this trip, and especially on the hills, I would very often get well ahead of her without realizing it. I would stop to wait and, if it was a particularly long hill or a tough day those waits could be five minutes or more. At such times my mind would start churning on all of the anxiety-inducing possibilities of what might have gone wrong. And every time I finally saw her cresting that hill or rounding that corner I felt not just relief, but a warm admiration for her spirit and resolve. She’s not a quitter and she’s not a complainer. I’m very thankful that she agreed to do this trip with me, and I’m proud of her for what she’s done.

 

San Diego, Oct. 28.

Some final thoughts on San Diego…

Yesterday I had a lengthy conversation with a panhandler. He asked for my name and gave his as “Pothead.” Pothead is mid-40s and mentioned that he’d slept on concrete the night before. This wouldn’t be unusal for many people I see on the streets here in the Gaslamp district, the equivalent of Gastown in Vancouver. Pothead has a quick wit and is pretty knowledgeable. It would seem he’s living on the street as much by choice as circumstance.

Pothead asked me what I thought of San Diego. I said I didn’t find it very interesting as cities go. That got his attention. Pothead is from New York, but he’s a proud San Diegan now. He asked me pointedly what I meant by “not interesting.” I mentioned the lack of diversity, the focus on middle-class tourism, the absence of any cultural interest. To each of these he demanded, “what do you mean by that?” He wanted explicit examples. I summed up by offering San Francisco as a counter example. That hit a nerve. “San Francisco is full of faggots,” he told me. “If that’s what makes a city interesting you can have it.”

I can’t decide how I feel about this city, which, as Pothead informed me, is the eighth largest in the US. Bigger than San Francisco, Dallas, Denver, Seattle, Boston, and many others. (This is based on city limits. Pothead and I debated whether this technical definition of a city’s population – under which Vancouver’s would be about 600,000 and Calgary’s over a million – was meaningful. He was adament that if you included suburbs, there would be no end to the limits in places like NYC. I had to accede to that point.)

Like the rest of Southern California, San Diego has lots of indigent people like Pothead. The climate is suitable for a life lived outdoors. It also appears that many of the people here living on the street were drawn here and seduced by the easy living “charm” of Southern California. They came for the beach scene and the good times and never woke up from that dream. They just scaled down their expectations. In any case, they seem less desperate than the street people who live in our northern climate.

The Gaslamp district has elegant old buildings and was once the heart of this city. Now it’s merely the centre of the city’s tourism/entertainment district. At ground level, those beautiful buildings all have bars and restaurants open to the street. Most are filled with TV screens hanging from ceilings and walls. And playing on TV? NFL football and the baseball World Series, of course. Pro sports is the glue that binds this country together. Trying to find a bar for a beer and maybe some conversation with locals without being assaulted by big screen sports is impossible here.  This city has very little urban sophistication. It’s too easy-going, friendly and (I have to say it) immature for that kind of coolness. But there’s not a lot wrong with that.

Sophie recently gave me a series of small sketches capturing memorable scenes from our bike trip to Mexico