Life's A Beach (USA Day 144)
We bid goodbye to Barry and Susan twice: once upon leaving and once after having realised that I’d left my gloves by the bathroom sink. The emergence of holes in both of my trouser pockets cannot be entirely blamed for the uptick of things we’ve left at hosts’ houses, but they’re related. After five months of touring, perhaps we’ve got a little frayed around the edges. Maybe we’re not doing quite so well at fixing the things that break, as if we’re sniffing the end point and shedding the sheddables in order to get there faster. By the time we reach Miami, we’ll be freewheeling with four flat tyres, no handlebars or brakes or pedals or such irrelevancies, in our final set of underwear, bottles empty, phone screens cracked, with a plane ticket and a deadline and not much else.
Santa Monica beach was as we’d left it: hot and weirdly empty save for the steady stream of rollerbladers and cyclists pootling along the meandering path. We joined that flow in no particular haste, enjoying the morsels of L.A. life that we inhaled as we passed. The pier had a rollercoaster and a Ferris wheel, neither of which produced the sounds we’re used to hearing. Everyone, even the thrill-seekers, seemed far too chilled-out to make any kind of screaming noise.
Then came Venice beach, where the tone shifted from heat-dazed to sun-crazed. It’s an edgy boardwalk for sure. The beach-side is populated with homeless or transient folks who’ve realised that a roof over one’s head isn’t so necessary when the weather’s like this all year round. Artists sold their scruffy canvases, uniformly of a style that they’d probably call ‘avant-garde’ but I’d brand as ‘rushed’. The general theme was dark tones, plenty o’ splotches and the occasional spray-painted motto. Live yo life. Respect nothing. Eat American Beef.
A dog waited patiently on a motorised skateboard as his owner tried to remote-control it forward. A gaunt-faced guy in a Rastafarian hat spoke earnestly to a bigger guy (who definitely wasn’t listening) about his recent high. “It came over like two waves colliding, man. Got to a point where I could control it, move it around. It was a total trip, dude.”
Along with the tattoo parlours, surf shops and cannabis dispensaries, we spotted a few chain stores trying to blend in. A Starbucks fronted with spray-painted Frappuccinos on concrete arches, a Ray-Ban shop with its logo hidden behind racks of expensive sunglasses. The people walking past were as on display as everyone else in this city, but in a looser sense. There was a radical, anarchist atmosphere that knew about its own presence, from the lads in the skate park practising tricks in front a constant crowd of photo-snapping tourists to the roller-skating selfie bikini individuals patrolling the bike path (though not that individual, given how many of them there were).
When we stopped to rest, it was long after the whirlwind of Venice Beach and a little past the disappointing lack of muscles on show in Muscle Beach. The sun blazed down. We ate our crackers and carrots feeling a little faint. None of the day so far had been pleasing (not that we expected it to be), but neither was it dull. But this wasn’t the kind of beach where you’d get much pleasure from wave-watching, not least because we couldn’t actually see the sea from our chosen spot, so we pushed south.
The path continued all the way to Ranch Palos Verdes, past pretty piers, grids of beach volleyball fields (Courts? Pitches?) and hard-packed beach-houses. Slightly inland, the airport burped out a steady stream of low-flying planes who left westward towards the sinking sun. Until our final climb to our hosts’ house, it was pan-flat and postcard-picturesque: the kind of day when the normal ebbs and flows of a long cycle ride just don’t apply. I don’t remember hours passing, but they surely did, because by the time we reached our hosts’ house up the hill in a quiet housing estate, it was fast approaching sunset. Google did its best to ruin our day by recommending a route along a woodchip telephone-line path. We dutifully followed for about a thousand feet before returning to the nice main road with a lovely bike lane. Thanks but no thanks.
An orange moon rose over L.A. as we slurped veggie chilli with our hosts and chatted bike tours. They’d begun right here and ended just east of New York, we the total opposite. They’d done the whole country in sixty days, us…hmm. I guess we took a little too long over lunch.
