San Diego!
By admin | July 4, 2012
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Encinitas to San Diego
22 miles
We started out by having breakfast with Kay O. Like Sadie, Kay O had been on the Odyssey bike trip around the world in 2000 with Ben Willetts, which is how I met both of them in the first place. Kay O, who has completed Paris-Brest-Paris, came to meet us on a cruiser with a chain that kept falling off. This made it extra unfortunate that her partner Jeff wasn’t able to join her for this trip, because he is known for being able to fix a deraillieur with a rock.
After a leisurely second breakfast, we figured we should get on with finishing this trip. We stopped to take pictures of surfers,
and soon found ourselves at the top of the north end of Torrey Pines Hill. As we waited at a light due to a lane closure, ten or so day cyclists, in full spandex, gathered at the light with us.
“You’re almost there!” they told us. Looking down the hill and back up the other side, I got a little nervous about which route to take. The main road climbed steadily off to the left, but there appeared to be a steeper road to the right. Which one was the right one? One of the cyclists at the light assured us that we could take the steeper one if we wanted to, but both went to the same place. He himself was going to take the longer and less steep one. So were the other bikers, so so did we.
I’d cycled up this hill before, but only on the back of the tandem. Still, I remembered it as a challenge. This time, it wasn’t. That felt good.
The UCSD campus is at the top of that hill. I had alerted my friend Windy, who works in the math department there, that we were about to pass through. He took a short walk on his lunch break and met us. After catching up with him, we decided to stop at a shopping center just on the other side of campus. Sadie was still looking for a dress to wear to the wedding. At this stop, she found a dress and cute shoes!
All these extended stops were making this short mileage day quite a bit longer. We needed lunch! After that, we rode about a mile to the cafe that makes my favorite ginger Boba tea. How could we pass that up?
We realized that Sadie was within just a few miles of hitting 1500 miles on her odometer. We had several more miles to ride downhill into Pacific Beach. We’d take the Rose Creek bike path, my old daily commute when I attended UCSD and lived in PB. The rest of the day’s route would be quite flat, until right at the end, when we had to go back up hill to Normal Heights. I used to live in that neighborhood, so I had been debating which way we should go all morning. Texas Street was more direct, but steeper. Washington Street was more gradual, but a bit out of the way, including going a few blocks the wrong way on a one way street. But it did go past fresh tortillas in Old Town.
We’d been updating Ben with our progress throughout the day. He was too busy getting ready for his wedding to ride in with us, but he thought he would try to meet us somewhere. Then he offered to pick us up in the van if we wanted. Sadie and I considered. We’d already made it to San Diego. We’d reached our goal. If he picked us up on the far side of the bike path, she’d have 1500 miles as well. We told him to come get us.
So that was the end of the road! We drove up Texas Street instead. I went to yoga class with Mara, then we met Kay O, Ben, Sadie, and Cammy, another Odyssey rider, later at the avocado curry place. (Thai Village, on Mission Blvd.) If you find yourself in San Diego, you must try it. I don’t know why anyone eats anything else there but the avocado curry.
The end of our trip was satisfying, delicious, and full of good friends. I vowed to eat nothing the next day.
Leave Your Comment