February 16, 2007

I scoured our laminated fold-out map, the LA bike map pdf, and google maps, comparing back and forth, trying to choose our route carefully.

Mark glanced at it, said "Let's just take Rampart to 8th and take it all the way west," and seemed satisfied.

I took another five minutes or so to decide that, yeah, okay, that was probably fine. But I came up with a couple alternate routes, before Mark finally badgered me into puting on my helmet and shoes and reattaching the pedals to our bikes (they have to be taken off to ship them with Amtrak).

We rolled our bikes out the front door of our charming little house on a hill, carried them down the few steps, and then learned that we were going to go through brake pads a lot faster here, as we squeezed the brakes all the way down, down, down the windy road, down from our hill.

Sunset Boulevard, which we live right off of, has a bike lane, so it was a gentle start.

We pedaled with no drama, up and down the little bits of hill, in the sunshine. We looked for Rampart, and looked and looked, and finally I yelled to Mark "Hey! Can we stop a minute?"

"What?" he asked, irritated.

"Well I think we might've passed it."

"I don't think so," he said, in the same tone he'd used to badger me into putting on my shoes and helmet.

"Well let me just take a sec to look," I said, pulling out the map and trying to get myself oriented. I could feel which way the water was, but I so badly wanted that to be east. I told myself No, the water is west, Maddy; West. That means that, over there, that's North." But as soon as I was done telling myself that, my sub-brain flipped right back to Water=East.

"Okay," I said to Mark, "look, we passed it by quite a bit. It's back here," I pointed. "And we're here," I pointed again.

"Oh, I see. Yeah, okay, it's only on one side of the street," he said, calming down now that I was delaying us to save us time.

So we turned around, and we found it pretty easily. It was a steep climb, but doable, and when we got to the top, WHEEEEEEEEEEE!!!! all the way down!

Adrenalin, lactic acid, and endorphins, oh my!

We rerouted to get across the expressway, and found our way without drama to 8th Street. 8th Street then dead-ended at a neighborhood that was rich enough, apparently, to block off street access to riff-raff like us. A rent-a-cop car drove by while I stood looking at my map, next to the hedge-and-gate barrier. He lingered while we decided which way to go, clearly having nothing better to do.

We cut north a bit, to a bigger through-street, and then split off at La Brea, Mark going to check in with work, me continuing on to the Apple store, to see if they could do anything for my poor departed lappy.

They could not, so I resigned myself to shelling out the money for a new one, and I met Mark at a nearby Trader Joe's he'd found while waiting for me to be done. We bought familiar items and packed them into my pannier, along with my dead computer.

And we biked back, easily rolling along the wide lanes of Los Angeles (even with my heavy bag), no honking, no one threatening to side-swipe us, over the hills and far away, biking in California with no aching in my heart*. (*credit to Led Zeppelin) What a nice surprise. A 16- or 17-mile round trip with no drama.

The hill up to our house was the hardest part, but we managed to bike up the whole way without stopping to rest. We got home feeling exhilarated and triumphant, and sat down to make some serious sandwiches.