Category Archives: bikes

bikes, city, MTB, travel, USA

SD Zoo & two more rides

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The day off from sightseeing today – I get a bit sick of it & today’s early start hasn’t helped my energy levels (it may have been the three hour well-paced ride this morning). Yesterday I went off to the renowned San Diego Zoo nice & early. I’m not much of an animal person, but it’s a great place & it exceeded my expectations. Particular highlights were the reptile house & all the snakes, lizards & komodo dragon.

Also, was pleased to see a different kind of pheasant (Malay Great Argus) – the photo is a little poor through the netting. And I spent a good while looking at the kiwi foraging in the dark – I don’t remember ever having seen one so close in NZ (that’s not to say it didn’t happen – only I may have been quite young).

The new elephant enclosure was pretty good – but it’s not quite the same as seeing them roaming the streets in Thailand or Nepal or even going for a trek on one. Giraffes have always been a particular favourite of mine, so it was cool to see some tall-tall ones & some short-tall ones (the youngest being only a few months old).

The gorillas were good to watch as well & a special mention must be made of the polar bear. I have never seen one so playful & active – all the ones I have seen in exhibits (or anywhere for that matter) have looked rather bored. This one had oversized ball to play with in its enclosure. It was a big day of walking & some pretty decent hills in there too – so I hopped on the Skyfari cable car to get back to the top – as you can see it’s a big zoo:

Back home & a brief refuel (for me, not the car) & then off to meet another MTBer from mtbr.com . We rode for about an hour and a half on some tracks that are supposedly off limits (“I mentioned it once – but I think I got away with it”) – not that you would know, we must have seen thirty other riders out there. Some nice rocky & dusty trails up a canyon (interrupted by a brief mechanical – Allen managed to bend a tooth on his granny ring perpendicular to where it should be – this in turn caused shifting problems & then broke the chain – just as well I had a breaker & Missing Link), before we went up a side canyon under a pretty canopy. Quite a nice middle-ring climb with a few technical bits to keep it interesting. Reached the top of the mesa & then we hit one of the five routes down. Really tight trail with very low overhanging twisted trees – reminded me a little of beech forest riding in the South Island. The first route downhill went for ever & it was a lot of fun. Reaching the bottom, we went up the same route & down a different one – this one was even closer & more technical – good fun, but a bit shorter & didn’t seem to flow as well.

As if that wasn’t enough, I was up at 5.30 this morning for another ride (the one that got canned on Tuesday). Drove about twenty minutes to meet another mtbr.com mate. After a bit of tuning (my brakes don’t squeal quite as much now), we were riding by 7 o’clock. A few miles of road before we hit Mission Trails, then under another freeway before we hit the outskirts of the same Marines air base as Monday – this time on the opposite side & well away from anything. The riding was extremely hard packed drit trail with a few ruts left over & the odd rocky patch. Hard & fast. A nice long series of switchbacks to climb a fair way & then the switchback went all the way down – some were quite gnarly & very dusty, rocky & rutty. Started to miss 2.3 tyre on the front when I almost lost the second corner, but no problems after that – just fun. Continued winding our way up the valley/canyon for a while with a few pinch climbs. Reached a gate & decided since it was 9 o’clock, it was time to head back. Big chain ring down a lot of the path back down & really starting to enjoy the rocks. With a brief mechanical stop (it turns out the pivot in Chip’s Blur had snapped) & a couple of good climbs, we were home at 10.00.

Popped in to the SDPD Northern District HQ to try & get my stolen money back – apparently I have to wait until Monday 3 pm when we go over the scene of the crime with the DA & detective. Which is a bit of a pain in the butt, as I was planning on driving to Vegas that day – it will be a late night, but which night in Vegas isn’t?

A bit worn out & not wanting to do the tourist thing again just yet – I drove Chris out an hour east on I8 to pick up the van – which has had its radiator replaced. It got back safely & our eventful camping trip can finally be put to rest.

bikes, city, history, MTB, travel, USA, vehicles

A car, a ride & a few museums

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Hopefully a quick update before bed tonight – it was a restless night & early morning. Yesterday was pretty uneventful – read a bit of Mark Twain (thought I better start one day), picked up my rental car – it’s a black Dodge Avenger that easily swallows the bike in the trunk (which is the main thing of course), has some interesting build quality & unfortunately for the size of it, is underpowered (2.4) & mated with a good old jerky automatic gearbox (sure beats riding all over town though)

– & went for another ride. This ride was much closer to home with one of the guys I met on Sunday, generally around Rose Canyon – we crossed railroad tracks, scrambled under the freeway, clambered up & down canyons, bushwhacked where the trail was overgrown, crossed the bottom end of a military base (the Topgun one incidentally) – a good work out for almost two hours & all only five minutes from home.

Monday morning up bright & early (5.30), bike in the car & off for another ride. Surprisingly, it rained a little in the night & I was not expecting that the ride would be cancelled because there was a small chance of rain. Nevermind, there is always Thursday morning!

So the cancelled ride freed up the rest of the day & I was off to Balboa Park to check it & some of the museums out. The park is one of the oldest in the States & 1200 acres, home to numerous museums & the world famous San Diego Zoo. Many of the buildings along El Prado were put up for the 1915 Panama-California Expo (that was to celebrate the completion of the Panama Canal) & are Spanish themed & are pretty darn cool.

I went to four museums – the San Diego Air & Space Museum (heaps of cool old planes & space stuff – suits, Apollo 9 command module), I quite enjoyed this as it had a lot of modern history in it; the San Diego Automotive Museum, this was OK – too many hotrods, but the old original cars were quite neat (but I rate the old Te Puke Vintage Auto Barn higher); the Fleet Science Center – was OK also, lots of hands on sciencey stuff; & lastly the Museum of San Diego History – the smallest of the lot, but I loved it & finding out more of the history of the people of San Diego.

Booked a room in Las Vegas for the start of my road trip next week. The plan keeps changing, but hopefully two nights in Vegas, two or three in Southern Utah for riding & visiting Grand Canyon (North Rim), a day riding in Mammoth, riding around Tahoe somewhere, a bit of sightseeing in San Fransico & then come back to San Diego down the coast. I’ll just have to see how much I can fit in & how much driving I can take (that’s getting close to 2000 miles).

Bed & hopefully a better night’s sleep calls – off to the zoo tomorrow.

bikes, MTB, travel, USA

Riding at Big Laguna

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Returning to civilisation, I found a message waiting for me about a potential ride the next day. Mountain-biking is great – since posting on mtbr.com a couple of weeks ago I have had many tips & offers of rides around San Diego & further afield. I sorted out to go a fair way back to where we had been camping up the I-8 with a group on Sunday to ride at one of the most beautiful rides in the SD area. Unlike most of the local rides, it has trees. So after a nice sleep in & getting organised, the GT was loaded on the back of another pickup (they make some sense, not much, but at least a little bit) & we were off to meet the rest of the group – I was pleasantly surprised to hear a (slightly Americanised) Kiwi accent from one of the girls.

All up, there were seven of us – Roger (who originally contacted me) was riding his brand new Yeti XC carbon fibre bike. It was very light & very well specced, as one would expect. We started quite high (after about an hour’s drive) at 5500 feet & for the most part were riding around a basin that was meadow & pines. I was somewhat sceptical of the beauty of the sparse trees & general dryness of the place, but it grew on me & was quite pretty in places. We climbed a fair bit & got to here looking out to Mexico:

A nice sweet flowing descent that had tricky rocky switchbacks to start with & then flowing, but was very dusty & loose (almost caught me out a couple of times – also running a Maxxis High Roller upfront for the first time may have had something to do with it). In a new experience for me, I was complimented on my riding style – thanks Gabby . But I was also slightly embarrassed as Roger & I concurrently realise that my rear tyre was on the wrong way around – it must have been like that since the puncture-fest that was Karapoti ’09. Getting back out towards the meadow, we skirted around it & ended up going past the dry Small Laguna Lake & then up a quarter mile climb (the altitude really had my lungs heaving here – much worse than Nepal last year) to Big Laguna Lake, that actually still had some water in to it. There wasn’t really an inlet to the lake (it must come from snowmelt), & the outlet was pretty slow – so it was pretty stagnant. Still it added to the vista. A nice cruisy ride with some neat people & hopefully a few more rides to come in the next few weeks.

I should pick up my rental car tomorrow – will give me a bit of independence for sightseeing & more importantly riding.

bikes, city, friends, travel, USA

Already made the news

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Two very different parts to this blog: one, a nice tourist on a bike one – but a little boring; two, a much more exciting one – but pretty stink altogether.

With the bike together & hopefully enough sunscreen on, it was off to explore a small part of San Diego. Cruised down the hill to Pacific Beach & encountered my first four-way Stop. Not really having a clue, I soon worked out that whoever gets there first has right of way. Riding a bike around the suburban streets was pretty easy & unlike Switzerland last year, I had no problem staying on the right hand side of the road & was easily looking left first. Great walk/cycle/roller-blade way along the coast & it was getting plenty of use.

A nice sea breeze to cool the warm sun & there were plenty of people out enjoying it.

Great to see heaps of bikes out & about – cruisers now make so much more sense than they do in NZ; saw a few choppers, loaded up cycle tourists, pink titanium rims on a pink road bike, & only a few mountain bikes. Went over a couple of bridges & ended up riding around the coast a bit further to Sunshine Cliffs Natural Park, turned around & found my back home – having fun in more congested traffic. Nice to stretch the legs over twenty-four miles.

Looking where I got to on the map after my return made me realise it’s pretty easy to get a few places on bike – even if it is running knobblies. Maybe I’ll cruise down & spend the day at Sea World tomorrow.

So I wrote the first part of that yesterday afternoon – Sea World will have wait until Wednesday after last night’s events. Sometime after dinner & fruitless attempts to get a wireless router to go with Vonage (some phone system – I haven’t quite worked out what it does yet), Anna-Marie, Andrea & I headed out for a couple of beers at Andrea’s favourite bar down PB (Pacific Beach). I was pleasantly surprised by whatever beer I had – can’t remember what, but definitely not Bud – it wasn’t all bad. We strolled from the bar down to get tacos – I was thoroughly confused by Spanish menu, but whatever it was that the girls ordered turned out just fine. The complete opposite to the walk back to Andrea’s house.

After walking through an empty parking lot, some guy started walking towards us from the other side of the street – I didn’t pay much notice, as I just thought he was drunk. What transpired took a good few seconds for me to comprehend – Andrea (who was closest to Hoodlum #1) struggled with him as he tried to snatch her handbag. He wasn’t haven’t too much luck as Andrea had a fair hold of the bag, he only really had the handles. Once I had some measure of comprehension, wafer-thin (“just one more mint, Sir”) me rather ineffectually tried to break it up. Details are a bit vague at this time, but from somewhere another guy came at me with a small baton & chased me around the corner. I wasn’t too keen on this baton & crazy Hoodlum #2 breaking me in half, but thankfully disappeared in to thin air (I was to prove a pretty poor witness!) when a few green notes changed hands. By now the girls were on the other side of the intersection & Hoodlums took off in a black two-door coupe.

By now Anna-Marie was talking to 911 & Andrea had a fair amount of blood from two teeth that had moved south a couple of millimetres after a punch to the face & a nasty looking cut on one finger. Still somewhat staggered we milled around on the main road waiting for the cops to turn up – some half an hour later an ambulance turned up (the paramedic must have been to the Bernard Black School of Public Relations – she was a piece of work), Andrea pretty much had to clean herself up in the back of the ambulance & a fire-engine turned up as well (I love American fire engines – they have so much more presence than NZ ones & are a lot shinier). Eventually the cops turned up.

The two that turned up must have forgotten that good cop-bad cop is for suspects, not witnesses. The one that interviewed Andrea was quite pleasant – the tall one that interviewed Anna-Marie & I was a dickhead. It was about this time I realised how dark it had been & I was such a useless witness. Tall nasty cop pointed out that the guy with the baton never really asked me for money – but I didn’t care, that baton spoke loud enough & I am more than happy to be unharmed & slightly poorer. Sometime around this time (now probably 12.30 – 1.00 am) another unit pulled over a car fitting the rough description of ours some miles away on the freeway (we found out later that a tow-truck driver had seen these guys steal a GPS from his truck & followed them).

When more cops arrived, we each got driven some miles away to where the car & suspects were found for a curbside identity parade. I got my first ride in a police car, & it’s not so bad up front. Unfortunately Officer Sean wasn’t willing to put the flashing lights on for me. When we got there Officer Sean went to sort out the identity parade, I got left in the front of the car & it was all I could do not to turn the flashing lights, the sirens, the PA or the fog horn – not to mention pull the shotgun off the rack – but I could listen to the radio as they called in the helicopter to search for more of our friends. For the next couple of hours we pretty much stood & sat around & Andrea identified a few of her belongings in the car, each of us went through looking at five hoodlums (basically they were each in a car up front of another squad car that had its spotlight on & they would bring each one out to face the light while we wandered up in turn & look at them as they did a nice little spin). Once again, I was next to useless here – one of the five looked like he was one of them, but it was dark previously so I don’t think I was much help. After all that happened we had stick around until a detective turned up to catalogue, photograph & print the items in the car & give back what belonged to Andrea.

All that remained after the Mustang was towed was for the last remaining cop – we were down to one after previously occupying nine cars, a helicopter, a fire engine & a bitchy ambulance – to take us back to Andrea’s house. Cruising down the length of the street it all happened on I got to use the squad car’s spotlight (rather poorly) as we searched for the handbag that may have been thrown out the car. Finally home & in to bed at 4am – what a night!

Today has been comparatively quiet – sleep/lie in until 11am. Andrea has of course been to the doctor & dentist – two teeth that will die with in the week & need to be replaced with titanium, a fractured jaw & no broken fingers. Six thousand bucks apparently – I got off lightly. It’s all still a bit bewildering – did that really happen to us? Normally I have no problem being the skinny little weed that I am – but for once it would have been nice to be Jack Reacher & kick some butt.

I think tomorrow should be Sea World & I probably won’t go out tonight! We even managed to make the news. This one is a bit more accurate.