Breakfast Ride and a House Tour

Around the ides of March I was in LA to visit the parental units. It so happened that the West Valley Cycles monthly Sunday Breakfast Ride was that weekend, so I elected to join in. The ride is always pretty mellow, and consists of a ride to breakfast and then a doodle around someplace interesting. It generally allows for a return to The Valley by 1 or 2pm.

If the weather is cooperative, the March ride is often out to someplace where the California poppies are blooming. Although California is a brash state, the state flower is shy and retiring. There's a poppy reserve out by Lancaster on the edge of the desert, but many years there's simply not enough and/or not the right kind of rain for there to be a big bloom.This year the rumor was that the poppies weren't showing much in the desert, but that the mountainsides along The Grapevine (I-5 as it crosses through the Tejon Pass) were glorious.

We rode out to Newhall on surface streets for breakfast.

Afterwards, we enjoyed the pleasant weather as we rode up I-5 to the Templin Highway. This is an exit that is little used; it was long ago used to build the reservoir at Pyramid Lake, but now ends above it, and as a result of Septemeber 11th, the road has been blocked well short of it. It's kind of an anomaly since it's a 4 lane divided road built from concrete. It's builders obviously expected it to have a great deal of heavy traffic.

There weren't a great number of flowers, so we headed back to I-5 and then to the north side of the highway. Here it provides access to The Old Ridge Route, the remainder of what was once the only way over the Tejon pass. The road turns to dirt after a few miles, just beyond a power plant access road. That, too, is fenced for security reasons these days. So we made our way back to The Valley.

A number of us went out to Randy and Patty's new house in Chatsworth. We found the house and grounds to be pleasant, the garage to be spacious, and the patio to have beer, bloody marys, and chips and salsa.