So very often the best bike rides are also the most ill-considered.

After 16 straight hours of sitting on Amtrak from ABQ to Los Angeles, I decided to eschew sanely putting the loaded bike on a Metro train out to my AirBnB in Santa Monica and, instead, rode the damn thing straight from Union Station thus:

Pretty much no sleep on the train overnight, riding streets I’ve never traveled (in any form of transport), and in a town as renown for car-centricity as any on Planet Earth. What could go wrong?

Fortunately nothing did and it was definitely in my top-five rides of the year. One thing largely left out when one is trying to stay alive on stroads like Sunset Blvd. is sightseeing. I’ve had to go back over this ride to get any idea of where the Hell I was and what the Hell I was riding past.

Turns out that, as I took the relative safety of Fountain Avenue off of Sunset, I went through Fountain as it intersects “L. Ron Hubbard Way” at Scientology World Headquarters, right next to the “Self-Realization Fellowship Hollywood Temple: Church of All Religions.”

So I got that going for me. At the time I was more focused on staying alive than Self-Realization, but maybe they’re the same thing.

More best rides to come. It was a good year.