Ace Ventura (USA Day 141)

Patch breaks are becoming increasingly common. Time for new tyres?

It was inevitable: at some point today, the paradisiacal Californian beaches, lazy towns and warm breezes would morph imperceptibly into Los Angeles’ urban sprawl and we’d know the prettiest section of this ride was over.

We left the campsite early and found a sunny clifftop, where we sat on the warming tarmac and patched some punctured inner tubes with a Nutella sandwich. (We didn’t patch the tubes with the Nutella, though I’m sure it would have worked great. They just happened concurrently. Just to clarify.) A pod of dolphins played around in the surf below us, and the patches held fast. Altogether one of the least stressful bits of bike maintenance you can have.

A little bike path led us past another campsite and up onto Highway 101, but not for long enough for our spirits to flag. Next was Goleta, a cute University town housing a tree full of small green guavas which we snaffled up gratefully, and more students on bikes than we’d even seen in Cambridge. UC Santa Barbara dubs itself the world’s most bike-friendly college, and it’s hard to argue with that. We followed a bike path through the centre of the college, wowed by the fully-parked rows of bike locks outside every classroom, every dorm. Even the students who were walking must have been making their way to or from a bike, just by extrapolation. We felt a bit silly, all dressed in our gear, lugging our loaded juggernauts past all these backpacked students on fixies.

The paths continued, past avenues of palm trees and placid beaches, then behind rows of houses and through quiet estates. All the while, the city stink failed to catch us. Mile by mile, we knew we were drawing closer.

Santa Barbara came next: an extraordinary town built outwards from a Spanish missionary outpost. The squat white stucco buildings had red tile roofs and sandy courtyards. Another vibrant high street greeted us, cramped shops competing for attention on a street filled with chilled-out Californians taking life at an enviably slow pace. Alas, this couldn’t last. One glance at the map told us the rest of the day followed the 101.

Chad, a self-professed bum. That means something different here.

Followed, but not joined. A bike path took us on the ocean side in the most part, hugging the beach along long, flat coastline, the ocean on our right and stern, dry hills looming up to the left. They’d marked our paths well so that our job was easy: keep pedalling, follow that bike path, enjoy the view, don’t get sunburned.

We reached Ventura in a daze. Where was the grotty LA suburb? Who’d replaced it with another Mexican-themed downtown with palm trees joined by strings of fairy lights? Why was this all so nice?

I’ve looked at the map. Tomorrow we stick on Highway 1, but that goes through Malibu. I’ll be damned if it looks pretty green for the majority of the day. Honestly, the riding has no right to be this good so close to such an enormous city.