With my apologies...

First let me say to my children that I am sorry. If you thought that eventually there would be something for you to inherit, this trip will be the death knell for that idea. Sorry!

Another item for the bucket list, sort of... I never had riding a motorcycle in L.A. traffic on the bucket list, I just figured it would be the death of me so it would go on the list posthumously. But I made it! I'm spending the night just above Long Beach, which is on the south side of L.A., so I Made it!

The day started out poorly though. I stepped outside my motel room this morning and had a great photo-op of the mountains to the north of town. I grabbed the IPad and pointed it in the appropriate direction and... Nothing! The screen was black, it didn't seem to respond to any buttons, or combinations of buttons; couldn't turn it on or off. Once in awhile it would chime like Siri was hiding in the darkness but couldn't help. So I called Lisa and we tried a couple of things, talking back and forth on my cell phone while I was sitting in front of the unresponsive device. Just as all seemed to be lost Siri piped up and said "I'm searching for "what do you think would happen if we plugged it in, do you think that would change anything or will I just....", she rattled off about five minutes of our phone conversation for which she thought I was requesting a search. It was pretty funny. Have I mentioned recently that I hate computers?

When I finally hit the road I back tracked to highway 101. I knew I had to turn left and cross over the highway on a bridge to get to a parallel route south of my motel. There were two lanes turning left so I figured the left lane would cross the bridge, the lane to its right would be the on-ramp for 101 northbound, where I had come from last night.

As I came around the corner I had a car right behind me and several to my right in the next lane. But the State of California had the right lane join the turn lane from the other direction and both of them went up and over the highway while my lane went underneath them and became the on-ramp for 101north. (Sound confusing? It was!) by the time I realized I was in the wrong lane there was no graceful way to recover so I got onto the highway going north (at least all the cars were going with me and not coming at me!). So I went north to the first exit and got off, thinking I'd get right back on in the other direction. Wrong! I had exited onto a divided highway and had to go miles East before I could exit from it!

It wasn't the last time today I went in circles. The route I saved on Strava looks like a kindergartner's art project.

Once I got to the coast I figured out what they do for recreation in SoCal. The coastline, of course, goes for miles and miles. Every couple of miles the State declares a "park" or "beach" and gives it a name. Then between these areas there is a group of a dozen or so beach houses, crammed so close together they need to call their neighbor to apologize if someone passes gas. Then between the parks, public beaches and houses are sections of shoreline where the locals park there RV's and put out the slide out and awnings, set up the barbecue grill and a row of lawn chairs and sit all weekend, eating barbecued tofu, drinking beer and watching the ocean. In a couple of areas the sand from the beach has blown across the highway for years and formed a tall steep hill of sand. People climb the hill with their beach chairs and sit on the hill, looking across the highway, over the tops of the RV's that arrived on Friday and scarfed up the primo sites, watching the ocean! 

This pattern repeated itself over and over again with hundreds of cars and motor homes parked alongside the highway for as far as the eye can see. With the exception of the area near Malibu, I didn't see anyone in the water, and only one old man fishing. All others were serving as lawn chair ballast.

The final 40 miles on the north of L.A. was a snarled mess of cars, going at times as fast as 40 mph, at other times not. No gun play today though; it must not be hunting season yet. To think that this traffic was backing up on a Sunday afternoon before they closed the ocean and all those RV's headed home is disheartening.

There was a place called Neptune's Net on the west side of Malibu that had about 200 motorcycles parked outside. They feature clams and lawn chairs to watch the ocean!

One other observation today. It came as a surprise to me that gas stations and restaurants opt not to offer public restrooms in many cases. With all of the people gathered I guess that makes sense because they have no way of enforcing a "customers only" policy. Still it was a surprise. I stopped at two restaurants and two gas stations that did not have public restrooms! The second station was in a strip mall and they told me that only the 99 cent store (the anchor store) had a restroom! I wonder if the other businesses chip in every month to supply toilet paper? Oh, and there was no toilet paper.

So tonight I am on the south side of L.A., almost exactly 2,000 miles into my trip! Tomorrow I will be meeting Jason and co. at Lego Land for Aurora's birthday. From there we'll move inland for a few days of r & r, do some laundry, wash my bike and remove some of the dirt that makes it look orange!