Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Today there was no official Sunday bike club ride, so the four of us who wanted to ride made our own. I made up a route that took us over to Hollywood, then up Nichols Canyon to Mulholland Drive. We took Mulholland down to Cahuenga Pass and then down into Burbank. Our snack stop was at Priscilla’s in Toluca Lake. Then straight home through Glendale and Eagle Rock. 49 miles.

Today I went for a bike ride to see the sanitarium where Curly Howard died, as well as the cemetary where he is buried. Both are relatively close to our house. The sanitarium is an old building set back off the road, and it’s kind of hard to see. The cemetary seems a bit out of place, as it’s in the middle of the East L.A. barrio. Not the place one expects to find a Jewish cemetary. Still, it was an interesting little adventure, and it’s worth pausing for a moment to salute Curly, since he can still make us laugh over 50 years later. The bike ride was pretty nice, too. I did it early in the morning, so there wasn’t too much traffic. 29 miles.

 

I installed Wordpress on our system for testing. It’s pretty nice. I wrote a little Perl script to import the contents of our old home-grown blogs into it.

Rode with Foothill again today. It was Gene’s ‘Horizontal Bomp’ ride. Out to Monrovia, south to Temple City, and back through San Marino. The snack stop was at Il Fornaio. Then we went down past the Rose Bowl and up to Altadena Drive for the long downhill home. 38 miles.

We went over the the Motion Picture Academy in Beverly Hills to see their current gallery show about set decoration. They had pieces of sets from lots of recent movies. It was a fun little adventure.

 


After this we went to the Japanese Museum in Little Tokyo to see “September 11: Bearing Witness to History”, which is a traveling Smithsonian exhibit of artifacts recovered from the sites of the September 11th attacks.

Did an early-morning ride today. Out to Duarte and back. Left the house at 06:25 and was back by 08:00. 25 miles.

Short ride early this morning. Duarte and back by the usual route. 25 miles.

Rode to Griffith Park with the Covina club today. The ride started in Arcadia and went through Eagle Rock and Glendale to get to the park. Sadly, they didn’t go as fast as I would have liked. On the way back, they stopped at Foxy’s restaurant in Glendale. I skipped the stop and headed home, since it was already 10:30 by then, and I wanted to be home by noon. The route back was pretty much straight down Colorado Blvd all the way back to Pasadena. 44 miles.

Last night we heard a tremendous crack and crashing noise in the middle of the night. This morning, we woke up and found a big tree branch had fallen down on our driveway. We called the city, and they sent a crew out who turned it into mulch. Ah, the joys of suburban living…

 

Rode with Foothill today. The Toluca Lake ride with a stop at Priscilla’s for a snack. Gene pushed the pace for part of the ride, and we were going pretty fast for a time. 41 miles.