Two Towns Over

Being the owner of a new bike, I'd been wanting to take advantage to the relative flatness of the area and go on a nice long ride. There were times when I felt like I was wasting that relative flatness and owning a bike since I wasn't going on long rides, but really, I've only owned the bike for a fortnight now...apparently I feel I must take every opportunity to add action to my time off work. I need to just relax some days.

In any case, I checked Google maps, and planned my trip accordingly; I would ride from our place in Long Beach over to San Pedro, a total of about twelve miles one way.

The title of this post hearkens back to The Simpsons, but also highlights the fact that before the city of Los Angeles annexed the surrounding area of the Port of Los Angeles, Wilmington was a separate city, as was San Pedro. Wilmington is the immediate community between Long Beach and San Pedro, so I was really riding "two towns over".

I'm setting Long Beach as the center point for some reference notes about bridges, specifically, the Three Bridges of Death that I had to cross to make it to San Pedro. I will refer to them as the Inner, the Middle, and the Outer. (The following pictures are taken from the bridges.)

The Inner Bridge of Death is the first you have to cross while leaving my city, and it crosses over the Los Angeles River.



The Middle Bridge of Death crosses a railyard and parking lot that services the Ports of LB and LA.



The Outer Bridge of Death crosses some industrial waste-water creek that must be ocean bound (stay away from that beach).



I call them Bridges of Death because on a bicycle the air from the constant flow of semis if trying to throw you over the side. It's loud and nerve-wracking. You have to peddle furiously going up but can't enjoy coming down because of the stop lights and the loss of your bike lane. Feeling accomplished just surviving them is probably not a good sign.

There was a series of signs that mentioned evacuation routes for tsunamis, one more wonderful ling to worry about down here (wild fire, earthquake, Oscar snubbing).



I don't have a water holder on the bike, so I had to stop periodically to drink from fountains and diners, and at one point, on the northeast side of Wilmington, I stopped in at a diner. It was ridiculously overpriced, and looking around the community only perplexed me more. Then I noticed a shirt being worn by a gentleman stuffing his face in a booth: it said "Stevedoers Local ###". That supplied the explanation; longshoreman can afford overpriced steak and hash browns.

Leaving there and cruising through Wilmington led me to the following conclusion: (with no offense to anyone from there) Wilmington is one of the ugliest, crappiest, sun-blasted spits of sand and cheap housing I've ever had the displeasure of biking through. With no coastal access, any view of the Pacific is blocked by Port machinery. Apparently, the only Civil war historical sight in California is a house in Wilmington, but that must have been somewhere far away from where I rode my bike (Avalon and the letters).

After there, and before San Pedro, riding along a rode in the depression parallel to I-105, I totally bailed. My front tire caught a groove of an old train track that was beating it suppression and coming out of the asphalt, sending me over the bars and onto the ground, scuffing my left knee and left palm.

I jumped up and brushed it off, but I still hurt. It put a damper on the rest of my day and really sapped my motivation. I had bigger plans for riding through San Pedro. I had vistas I wanted to get to, but San Pedro is way more hilly than anything up till then, so I made some stops at old stores, took some pictures, and headed home. Here is a picture of the tracks that caused me to bail, heading off under the freeway:



Here's the old Warner Theater in San Pedro:



When I got home I felt like I'd finally done due diligence to my need to utilize my bike to it's fullest extant, all the way to the point of being over it.