Wednesday, April 3rd – Day 1 – Santa Monica to La Verne, CA

(Today’s route to the KOA)

Best part of the day:      Having a wonderful dinner at our night’s lodging, the LA/Pomona/Fairplex KOA, provided by two of Rob’s cousins!! Roast chicken, rice, potatol salad, and other goodies!! Delicious!! Not to mention all of the wonderful conversation.

Worst part of the day:   All of the traffic lights at which we had to stop! Don’t know how many there were, felt like a hundred, but, none of us counted. And all of the traffic not only getting out of Santa Monica, but, through the bulk of our entire route!! Arrrgh!!

Distance: 54.6 miles        Riding time: 5hrs 22min

Bed count: 0 (not counting last night stay at the hostel) Sleeping bag count: 1

Arose around 7 to get ready for the hostel’s provided breakfast (cereal, coffee, tea, fruit, orange juice, makings for PB&J sandwiches) at 7:30. Jerry’s brother and his wife, Mike and Billie, came drove down from there home an hour away to meet up with us. Enjoyed chatting with them during breakfast.

Returned to our room to pack up, bring down our gear, retrieve our bike from storage and load up.

After pictures in front of the hostel, we were on our way to the Santa Monica Pier.

We had a short, steep descent to reach the “unofficial” End of Route 66 marker which meant we had to go back up the hill on our ride’s start!! Steepest hill we had all day!!

(The “End of the Trail” is just our beginning!!)

As mentioned above, getting out of Santa Monica was a slow, painful, traffic light-filled journey. It took us almost an hour to only go 5 miles because of hitting all of those lights!!

Through the various cities in LA county, we rode. From the fancy Beverly Hill area to the not so fancy South Pasadena. The farther away from LA we got, the less frequent the traffic lights we encountered.

Weather was cool, but, nice for cycling, mid-to-low 60s with some overcast.

After what seemed and eternity, we made it to our destination, the above-named KOA, a nice facility. The tent sites are on the edge of the property and the facilities building is not necessarily close to the tent sites!!!

As mentioned above, two of Rob’s cousins who live pretty close to the KOA brought us a wonderful meal.

Us with Rob’s cousins, Royceanne (l) and Kathee (r)

Until our next post….