While I can’t pinpoint it to an exact measurement, by my calculation I figure by the end of my bike business today give or take a tenth (or a couple) miles I’ll have 11.6 to go tomorrow morning to reach the not-as-elusive-as-I-thought 2,007th mile for the year.
And while I also can’t specify the exact degrees of longitute and latitude where I’ll arrive at that milestone, I have a pretty good idea of the vicinity: the intersection of Ocean Drive and Cota Street in Culver City next to a sliver of a park called Lindberg.
Why there? Well, the last few commutes I’ve been thrilled to have been able to incorporate a couple miles of the Ballona Creek Bikeway from its inland terminus at National and Jefferson to Overland, but yesterday I found just a little further west a ped/bike bridge over the waterway that drops me into this quaint and quiet residential alcove where Lindberg Park is.
Sure, part of me wishes I was crossing that threshold during one of our now-irregular IAAL•MAF rides or a RIDE-Arc or a Midnight Ridazz, or that it was happening in the 2nd Street Tunnel or atop the 6th Street Bridge, or the Griffith Observatory, or along the L.A. River, or around the Silver Lake reservoir, or overlooking Dodger Stadium and the downtown skyline from the summit of Elysian Park, or any of a dozen other places that are more significant to me then a nondescript non-Los Angeles street corner in the 90230.
But then again, I find it oddly fitting to be moving into mile No. 2,008 through a neighborhood I wouldn’t have otherwise discovered if it hadn’t been in the saddle of The Phoenix. Because in the end discovering things in this city — be it a gas cap iconically embedded in the asphalt at Santa Monica and Fairfax, or a previously unknown mural or an old adobe or a simple little neighborhood –Â is one of the things that makes being on a bike so fulfilling for me.
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