Let’s pretend it’s a Sunday morning.  The weather is beautiful, the skies are bright, your hangover has started to dissipate, the half-dressed stranger has been kicked out of your house, and by God, it’s time to carpe the damn diem.  My advice: first carpe your bike (or rent one), and then head down to The Strand.

A stretch of winding concrete path spanning 30 miles south from Will Rogers State Beach, The Strand offers a perfect way to take in the case of Multiple Personality Disorder from which our coast suffers so gloriously.

I started at the Redondo Pier and headed north, pedaling past the frat-tastic beach parties of Hermosa, cruising by a beached ship that street-artists had turned into a mural, watching surfers ride the (possibly radioactive) waves beyond the power plants, floated through the laconic East-Coast-fishing-village vibes of Manhattan, gliding under howling jetliners and through the boombox soul music and mouth-watering barbecue smoke of Dockweiler, zipping alongside sailboats in Marina Del Rey, dodging meth-heads and performance artists (po-tay-to, po-tah-to?) in Venice, stopping to play Tarzan on the swing-rings in Santa Monica, before finally heading up through the windswept sands adjacent to the PCH, where the trail died out.

Turning around to ride home in the afternoon sun, ocean air whistling past, I found myself mentally stealing (and slightly misappropriating) a line Edward Norton said in Keeping The Faith: “Anyone who doesn’t live here must, on some level, be kidding themselves.”

_______________________

WHAT: Bike path along every beach in LA
WHEN: Good all year round
WHERE: Starts in Redondo, ends at Will Rogers State Beach
$$$: Free

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 24th, 2010 at 3:05 pm and is filed under adventure, free, health, outdoors, weekend. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.