Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Today’s ride was my ‘Random Ride to Whittier’ that I cobbled together last fall. It takes pieces of several other routes and puts them together to make a route that basically doesn’t go anywhere in particular, but it does it without going over any hills. Since I’m going vertical next weekend with the Stratosphere Stair Climb, I thought that staying level today would be a good thing.

It rained overnight, and the forecast called for a 60% chance of rain today, so only four of us showed up. But the clouds moved out and we had sun and blue skies for the whole ride. It was very nice. It waited until we got home, and the the sky opened up. So we were lucky.

This route uses the Rio Hondo and San Gabriel River bike paths. The rain last night dropped a layer of fresh snow on the mountains, which made them a very nice backdrop for photos.

When we were riding through Whittier Narrows, Alex got a phone call. But that’s all right. I know it’s supposed to be illegal to drive while talking on the phone, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t say anything about riding a bike.

On the way back, we went farther up the San Gabriel River bike path, and we came to an underpass that was partially flooded. The guys we saw turning around said it was too deep to ride through. But I tried, and it turned out to be only 3-4 inches deep. So that wasn’t so bad.

Our snack stop was at Merengue in Monrovia. Then we rode straight home by way of Sierra Madre.

We didn’t get rained on, so it was a nice ride.

45 miles.
cycling

And that’s when a young man’s fancy turns to the ME72 Engineering Contest at Caltech. I’ve gone to see this several times over the years, and it’s always great fun. The 2008 contest featured machines hurling a ball across a field. In 2007 they had to place a small piece of chain high up on a net. And the rules explicitly allow machines to interfere with their opponents’ machines, which makes the whole thing much more entertaining to watch.

So next Tuesday, I’m going to walk over to the gym and see this. It should be fun.

This Sunday’s bike ride was to visit the Portal of the Folded Wings at Valhalla Cemetery in North Hollywood. It’s a monument to people who you’ve probably never heard of, but who played key roles in the early development of aviation. It was a nice day for riding.

We rode straight out across Eagle Rock and Glendale into Burbank. Then we took Victory Blvd to the cemetery. We spent a little time looking around before we headed out. On the way, we stopped to see Oliver Hardy and “Curly Joe” DeRita, who are also buried there. Then we headed south to our snack stop at Priscilla’s in Toluca Lake.

The route back took us down the L.A. River bike path, where we saw trees bent over from the rushing waters that filled the channel last week when we had some hard rain. Then we headed home by the standard route through Highland Park and South Pasadena.

It was a very pleasant ride.

44 miles.
cycling

The old hospital up the street from my house gets used a lot as a filming location. But it’s fairly rare that they film anything there outside the building. But they had the street posted for no parking tonight, which meant they were going to be filming on the street. So I took a walk up to see what they were doing. It was novel seeing the old hospital dressed up again as a hospital. It’s been closed for almost ten years now. They had a car on a platform set up with lights. The street was a little bit wet, which means they’d been filming something with the car driving on the street. I guess now they were going to film the close-ups of the actor inside the car. There was a tremendous amount of activity, but very little action, which is typical for these things. I gather it’s a pretty slow-moving business. But we all know that the end result looks good.

Everybody makes mistakes. But in today’s obituaries, there’s a story to top all of them. Just be glad if none of your mistakes turn out to be like this one.

Today’s bike ride was out to La Puente to see the Donut Hole drive-through donut shop. We’ve been out there before, but it’s always an entertaining sight. The weather was overcast and threatening to rain. Due to the street closures for the Pasadena Marathon today, we met at Memorial Park in Sierra Madre.

Riding east and south, it started to rain lightly. And then it started to rain harder. It got to be a pretty steady rain by the time we got to Las Tunas and took shelter under the overhanging roof of a 7-Eleven store. We waited there for about 20 minutes and the rain stopped. Looking at how the clouds were moving, it appeared that the rain was done with us for a while, so we continued on the ride.

When we got to the Donut Hole, we all got donuts and took a group photo. Then we continued on the route, making a loop around and ending up at Panera Bread in West Covina. We had some bagels and such. Then we rode back to the park. It was a pretty flat ride, and aside from the rain at the beginning, it was very pleasant.

43 miles.
cycling

Tomorrow is the Pasadena Marathon, and they have signs up on all the streets that are going to be closed for the race. The signs on the street by my office all say that the road will be closed from 1:00AM to 9:05AM. I wonder what’s special about 9:05? And if I go up the street and around the corner, will they say 9:06?

The inventor of the Easy-Bake oven has died. Read his story here.

Since Lucinda and I had the Presidents’ Day holiday off today, we decided to go back to Universal again. They only sell tickets with the ‘buy a day and come back any time for a year’ thing, we figured we’d take them up on it. Since today was a nice sunny and warm day, we figured there would be more people than last time, but the upside to dealing with crowds was that we weren’t going to get soaked. So we gathered up Kymber and we all headed over there this morning.

When we got there, we immediately headed down to the lower lot, since the sign said that the lines for the rides down there were not very long yet. We rode Jurassic Park once, then the Mummy twice, and then back to Jurassic Park again. In between the first and second Mummy rides, I stopped at the snack bar and got a napkin to make some earplugs. And then I was much more comfortable. As I’ve mentioned before, riding a roller coaster with two ten-year-old girls can involve a lot of screaming. The first picture on Jurassic Park had me stoically holding my ears to block out all the screaming on the final drop.

We had lunch overlooking the end of the Jurassic Park ride, and then we went back up and saw the “Waterworld” show. After that, we did the obligatory tram tour. I got a chuckle from the Los Angeles Fire Department golf cart. We usually think of the fire department with lots of gear going very fast to put out fires. And the image of them puttering around in a golf cart was just a bit absurd.

After the tram tour finished, we went back down to the lower lot for the “Backdraft” show. And then one more time on the Mummy. By then, it was getting late. I figured we had time for one more ride, so Kymber and I got in line for Jurassic Park again. This time Lucinda didn’t want to go for some reason. So while we were waiting, I texted her and said that we were going to send her a message from inside the ride. I wrote up a short message:

AAAAAAAAAA!!!

and saved it in the ‘Drafts’ folder on my phone. Then, when the boat was just tipping over the edge of the final drop, I pulled out my phone and hit ‘Send’. The ride photo shows me holding my phone in the air as the boat plunged into the water at the bottom.

All around, it was a fun day, even if we did have to wait in line some. The rest of the pictures are in Lucinda’s photo album.

Last week, I saw that TMZ had posted the coroner’s report on Michael Jackson’s death. Right on the first page of the report, it gave the address of the house where he had been living, and like Phineas Flynn, my first thought was, “I know what we’re gonna do today.” I mapped out a route for the Sunday bike club ride.

We rode out by the most direct route possible, through South Pasadena and Highland Park, and the across the L.A. River and into Hollywood. We rode down Hollywood Blvd, which is always a bit of a weird place to be riding a bike. Then we cut south to Fountain Ave, where we saw the house with “STOP In the Name of Love” on the roof. Then we rode down part of the Sunset Strip and on into Beverly Hills. We made a short sightseeing stop at the tree where Lindsay Lohan crashed her car a few years ago. Then we stopped at the park where George Michael was arrested in 1998. Then we turned off Sunset Blvd and up the street to Michael Jackson’s house. The gate was covered in flowers and little printed tributes that people had posted online.

Leaving the scene of the crime, we passed what was one of the coolest mailboxes we’ve ever seen. Then we rode up Benedict Canyon and then down the other side into the Valley. We stopped for a snack at a little coffee shop in Studio City, right across from Vitellos, which is the restaurant where Robert Blake and his wife shared their last meal before she was murdered.

On the way home, we also stopped off at the Barris Kustom showroom to peek in the windows at the Batmobile and other cars on display there.

All in all, it was a fun little sightseeing ride.

56 miles.
cycling