March 24, 2011. After posting the last blog (and struggling a bit with photos in my hotel room), getting breakfast around-the-corner from the Hotel La Pensione (a great place—and reasonably priced—in the Little Italy neighborhood of San Diego), and walking a lot farther than I expected to buy some sunscreen, I wheeled my laden bike (with at least 50 pounds of gear and water) to the elevator and down to the first floor. By the time I finished chatting with the proprietor and got on my bike, it was around 10:30 am.
My plan was to start my journey at the Pacific ocean—Ocean Beach Park, which is the western terminus of Adventure Cycling’s Southern Tier bicycle route across the country. I don’t have any expectations of biking all the way across the country, but I wanted to enjoy the first five or six miles of that route, which is on a bicycle trail. So I biked the roughly seven miles there from the hotel—testing out the loaded bike for the first time. Quite the different performance with a lot of weight on the front!
The above photo with me in it was taken by an obliging guy who was running his dog at Dog Beach (Adventure Cycling’s map instructions warn you about dogs here, but I didn’t have any trouble).
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