by Liz
Day’s mileage : 64
Running total : 2,068
Yesterday evening my old friend Cathy, who I met in 1987 on a hiking trip to the US, treated us to an Indian dinner along with her son and his family. It was great fun to see each other again, but also poignant without Cathy’s late husband Bob. What a delightful, welcoming family they created.
I thought a great deal this morning about my friend Debbie in the UK, as we rode through the vicinity of Redondo Beach where she grew up. We had about 20 miles through the outskirts of LA, a good number on beach paths and quite a few on the Pacific Coast Highway. The many faces of highway 1 surprise us, from a remote winding hill road to a crazy superhighway with four lanes in each direction and anything in between.
There are keen gardeners living along the west coast. We stopped for a snack outside a tiny house in an LA suburb with so many plants in the front garden you had to look carefully to see there was a house at all. It wasn’t in a wealthy area, and was quite a contrast to some of the other homes we passed today, also evidently owned by plant lovers.
I had imagined Dana Point, where we are staying tonight, would be a promontory, like Pigeon Point, with a lighthouse, a couple of buildings and ten thousand pelicans on rocks out at sea. Cathy gave me a clue when she said it’s a fun town. In fact it’s a significant size town by the sea. Sadly it also has sharp things in the cycle ways, though two fewer now we’ve removed them and replaced my inner tube.
The last hundred miles of this trip will have the same focus as the first, second, fifteenth or any other hundred miles of the expedition. I’ll want to know what’s in front of my tyres, what’s behind me, how wide it is and where it is on the road, and what’s coming towards me. I’ll savour each one, no rushing, regretting or worrying, look out at the ocean for whales and enjoy turning my pedals and watching the lines of pelicans flying overhead.
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