To camp or not to camp

So I've been thinking about the possibility of camping my way across the USA.  Of course, there will be many nights I can stay with friends or churches.  In fact, the trip is already set up largely that way, but there are gaps where I will have no one.  I will do my best, however, to fill my gaps with Calvary Chapel churches across the country or other Christian churches. 

Coleman's SunDome 7x7' 3-man tent.  I like it.

I feel like I want to have a tent big enough to bring the bike into, if I have a tent.  Coleman has a series of tents that can be easily set up by myself and just as easily taken down.  The thought of camping means ramping up the supplies I need, because i don't have the basics like tent, sleeping bag, matress pad, whatever.  I have nothing.  There is no way I can afford to stay in motels every night although certainly that would be convenient during the gaps. 

I haven't been camping since I was a kid.  My family, all 8 of us, used to go camping a lot.  We had a tent trailer and a big six-person tent.  That tent was set up with two sets of bunkbed cots, and we used to go up to 11-Mile Canyon in Colorado or to Lake Teryall and sometimes to the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, but mostly it was 11-Mile.  My dad went off to fish and the rest of us played in the woods, hiked and explored.  I would like to have been fishing with my dad, but that was something he really wanted to do alone.  Still, it would have been nice to have a fishing pole.  Sometimes he caught trout and sometimes he didn't, but my mother always prepared a nice camp supper for us regardless.  The tent trailer was sold in the summer of '73, and I don't remember camping after that.  I went to stay with my aunt in Iowa for a little while to help her with her two small boys when she and her husband first moved there, and when I came home, the tent trailer was gone.  I was sad to see it go.

But camping now brings up a ton of other issues.  I don't want to be carrying pots and pans and cooking stuff.  Just for the following items I would need to set aside $272 (approx): Coleman twin inflatable bed, Coleman SunDome Tent, sleeping bag, fleece liner, Camelbak 100oz.  I do have the pet trailer which can carry 40 lbs, so it can double as a cargo trailer with limited cargo.  I will have the full panniers also, although I don't know if I will put panniers on the front wheel.  I am quite certain I am completely over-planning this.

I will say that I have been looking at a new route - that instead of getting on the 10 freeway outside of Palm Springs to head eastward, I'd like to take a detour south to see the Salton Sea, a place I've never been to.  They have public campgrounds there.  So I might go south after that and catch the 8 freeway across.  Eventually I'll go up to Phoenix and stay with friends there.

Mother's Day blog

Today won't be about cycling nor any gushy platitudes towards my mother because I have something different to say about Mother's Day.

Today, being a Sunday, the pastor at my church is doing a Mother's Day sermon - which is a great thing if you are a mother, grandmother, expectant mother, a woman who hopes to be a mother... but I am not in any of those categories.  I am going to be 54 this year, and that biological clock doesn't tick for me.  It ticked loudly about 15 years ago, but now it is silent.  I will say that I am grateful at this stage of my life not to have children, and quite frankly, although parts of me think i would have made a good mom, I could have just as easily been the mother who drowned her five children in the bathtub.  I think motherhood would have put me into an early grave.  That's not to say that I don't enjoy children, but they need to go home at night!  So I just feel like I don't fit in when these sermon days come.

I appreciate the the church's stance on family, but having a husband and children never happened for me and I've moved beyond that wanting.  It is part of the reason why attending a women's Bible study has never been appealing to me.  I did try it for a while, but I felt so out of place, and it got to the point where wild horses couldn't drag me there.  I really was in hysterical tears one day about it when one of the leaders called me to see if I would be there.  No, I wouldn't.  Now if it were men and women, no problem, but something about the women's group just made me feel like an outsider looking in.  I didn't fit the mold of the woman's role.  I really don't understand the need for women to have their own Bible study anyhow or for the men to have their own.  Everyone should be together.

When I was much younger, I was a little jealous of girlfriends who were getting married and I wasn't.  It got to the point where I wouldn't go to weddings.  Unless it was a family member, I didn't go, and people seemed to know not to ask me.  Even so, I could count on both hands the number of weddings I have attended, and half of those were for my siblings.  I'm not anti-marriage at all and part of me still has a candle of hope lit that someday I might find a man who is my best friend and soul-mate and who wants to spend the rest of our lives together (and he needs to enjoy riding a bike and going for adventures on the bike).

So here I sit, purposefully ignoring the Mother's Day sermon that is happening.  I will listen to some older Greg Laurie sermons from Harvest Church instead.  And then later I will take a little bike ride and explore a Beverly Hills street that is an alternative bike route.

The bike I forgot

When I first moved to California in 1989, I moved into a condo that I shared with two other gals, Janelle and Christie.  Christie had a 10-speed bike that she either gave to me or sold to me for next to nothing. I say next to nothing because I was poor, poor, poor. I was living off of student loans and occasional temp work while doing my MFA at The American Film Institute.

I had a car but I did ride that bike around the neighborhood.  I didn't have a helmet or any special gear. I don't even remember if it had a bell. I don't remember ever pumping up the tires, but at some point it did go into a bike shop   somewhere up Sunland Ave. near Tujunga because I had a brilliant ride back. 

Alas, the garage door was left open too long one day and someone stole the bike.  Stupid mistake on my part as it may have been me. However, I didn't have garage parking privileges so maybe it wasn't me. 

It was 16 years before I got another bike, the bike I have now. 

This is my first post from the Blogger app.

Staying warm in church after a ride

Today it's very overcast, the kind of cloud cover that looks like it could release a deluge at any time.  Because we have had unusually high temperatures the last few days and now the temp has dropped, this has also created a blustery, gusty wind... or at least, that's the way it was around 11:30.

I left the house at 11:30 to head to church where the service started at 12:30.  It was quite blustery, with little whirlpools of wind whipping up fallen magnolia leaves into circles that swirled across the asphalt.  When I arrived at the Wilshire Blvd.  intersection, I was nearly blown sideways as the wind channeled down between the tall buildings.

This ride was my second time on the new route portion, and it was smooth and perfect.  I've only just discovered that all the construction blockages at National/Robertson/Venice are because of the overhead Metrolink rail system being built there, so I guess I'll be using my detour for a while.

With today's high being 64 and the wind making it colder, I wore a t-shirt with my merino arm warmers.  Sometimes when I get to church and I cool down from the ride, I can get chilled, so I decided to keep the arm warmers on, and I stayed comfortable.

April's "30 Days of Biking"

In April I took a challenge to do "30 Days of Biking" - something I found on Twitter.  So I did it.  I did it every day.  Some days it was 30 miles, some days 2 miles, but because I had made the commitment, I got out the bike every day.  The car has been driven less than 10 miles in the last 6 weeks because all the miles went onto the bike.  The biking was mostly to and from work, so it was no big deal really.

I put a "wanted" in the Los Angeles Freecycle (a Yahoo group) saying that I was looking for a bicycle trailer for my dog, and someone has offered their child carrier made by Instep.  The details haven't been worked out yet, but it's over in the Pasadena area, so I'd have to drive over and pick it up.  It gives me hope that I can think about doing the L.A. River Ride if I can take the dog with me and be gone all day.  So, if I can get her used to it a little, perhaps it will work.

Oh, and there's one more thing I want to say about CicLAvia - that I had wanted a ride on free flowing, open streets, but the bicycle congestion was terrible, worse than rush hour traffic on the freeways.  So the city needs to truly recognize the greater need for open streets, and the organizers of the event may want to have more than one route on that day so that a single route doesn't get over-whelmed.  If I want to sit in traffic, I'll drive a car, and that's sort of not the point of being on a bike.

CicLAvia - Downtown to the Beach via Venice Blvd

It started out simply enough - meet up at I. Martin Cycles at 9:15 for a feeder ride from West Hollywood to downtown for CicLAvia.  For some reason I thought we would take other streets to get downtown than those already designated for CicLAvia, but a group of about 15 of us headed mostly down Crescent Heights to Guthrie, then Guthrie to Venice Blvd.

CicLAvia was supposed to start at 10:00 but we got to Venice Blvd at about the half way mark before 10:00 and it was all set up and bikes were already on the move.  The group split with half opting to head to the beach and the other half heading downtown.  Since I have taken Venice to the beach countless times, I decided to go downtown - my second bike trip down.  The crowd heading west was much bigger than the crowd heading east, and it was a mostly smooth ride down except for one hill where I had to stop half way up to catch my breath.  I had already lost the group anyhow as we all just sort of split up.  After I caught my breath, I finished crawling up the hill with my bike.  It should be noted that this hill was so steep that on the way back everyone had to dismount their bikes and walk down the hill for crowd safety reasons.

Upon arriving at the end of the line somewhere downtown, I promptly turned around and started back, and that's when the enormous traffic jamming of cyclists began.  It was a painfully slow slog to get out of downtown, trying not to bump into other cyclists including small children or people towing children in trailers.  I had finished my 20-oz bottle of water in the heat of a cloudless day, and I was working on my 25 oz bottle when I realized that there was no way I could make it to the beach and back with the water I had left and with the time it was taking to move - it was very slow going.

I couldn't even say how many bikes there were, but at one point they were packed in as far as I could see ahead and behind me.  So I decided to stop the madness when I got back to Guthrie and I exited the CicLAvia event.  Honestly, at the crawl it was moving, I don't know how long it would have taken me to get to the beach and I didn't really care anymore.  I had hoped for a 40-mile ride, and one gal in the group from I Martin did manage it, but after 26 miles and nearly out of water,  I just had had enough.

So I don't know if I will ever do another CicLAvia, or at least not in the same way.  It would be nice to socialize with other cyclists but perhaps next time I'll not take the designated route but another route and just hang out, then take a non-CicLAvia route out, because the mob scene is definitely not my thing.

One thing I will say is that I need a Camelbak and will look into getting one this year when the cookie orders are more abundant.

Crazy tire issues and biking Fountain Blvd.

A scooter bike thing, but this guy kept up with the pace!

On Sunday I decided not to go to church but instead to take a group ride that was sponsored by the West Hollywood Bicycle Coalition #WehoBike.  We met up at the West Hollywood City Hall parking lot which is only 3 blocks from where I live, and I think about 25 people on bikes showed up.

We went up Sweetzer to Fountain Blvd and then took Fountain to the Ralphs parking lot on Fountain/La Brea - which was not quite 2 miles, and then we turned around and came back.  It was a ride to experience the hard-fought sharrows that have now been laid down on Fountain, which is a major cycling street and helps connect West Hollywood to other sharrow streets.  I heard Willoughby also had some sharrows laid down as well. 

The ride was on the new tube I installed, and everything seemed fine.  I went to work afterwards, adding another 6 miles on the bike, and still the tube seemed okay.

The bike after the cookie delivery but before the flat.

Yesterday I loaded up the bike with cookies to deliver to my Monday client and rode down there, no problem, then went to work.  When I came out of work, the tire was almost flat, certainly not ride-able.  So I walked the 2 miles from Shenandoah/Pico to Beverly/Sweetzer to I. Martin Cycles.  I had bought two new tubes on Sunday, and I told them I had just changed it out, and it was already flat but that I couldn't find the problem.  The guy took it apart and carefully inspected the inside of the tire.  Just like me, he could not find the problem.  No thorns, glass, nothing poking through, but the tube definitely had a pinhole in it.  How did it get that hole?  I have no idea.  They suggested perhaps getting a new tire, but in the meantime put in a liner for me and a new tube and pumped it up, and I rode it home.  I am not feeling 100% confident in riding it at the moment since I don't want to get too far from home and get stuck with a flat - because pumping it back up will not solve anything.  There is a bigger problem.  Three tube changes in less than a month is not normal, but we cannot find the integrity issue.   I don't want to hear about how much weight is on the back of the bike.  Before I even got the Bontrager hard case tires, I hadn't experienced a single flat since owning the bike.  The original tires, which had carried me for the first 4 years, are in my closet.  That was before I had the rack and side panniers, but I used to have a different rack that attached to the seat stem, and it carried a pannier that was no heavier than the one I have now. 

So, I'm going to hope the liner gets me through a few days at least.  The walk wasn't terrible yesterday, but afterwards, the 1 mile ride home was horrendous with very blustery head-on Santa Ana winds.  Sometimes I could hardly get over 8 mph.  It's times like those where I wish I had on some fully enclosed goggles so that no debris can get into my eyes.