Serendipity

Amber and I rode the 90 miles from Anaheim to Solana Beach on Saturday. When I got to Panera for breakfast on the way to the start I realized I had left my wallet at home. As you need ID to get through Camp Pendleton and to get on Amtrak I had to go back home to get it. This made me an hour late for the start of the ride.

We took the normal route to Santiago Canyon. I had not realized before how bad the route is. I will be changing that to add some miles at the start but keep us off the bad roads. We climbed up Santiago Canyon and got to Cooks Corner too late for breakfast :-( Oh well, the lunches are pretty good too. I had a breakfast burrito with lashings of hot sauce. I don't know why breakfast burrito is on the lunch menu.

We screamed down to the coast with the feeling of wind on my face and hotsauce on my lips. Because we started late we decided to catch the train at Oceanside instead of Solana Beach so we took it easy. It was a lovely day with highs in the low 80s. Traffic was lighter than usual.

At Oceanside we ate at Angelo's and then rode a couple more miles to the Amtrak station. When we got there they informed us that our train was running at least an hour late. That meant we could catch it at Solana Beach if we could ride 15 miles in 80 minutes. Amber pulled. We got there in 50 minutes despite hitting lots of red lights. We rode PCH through Leucadia - a section of PCH I detest, especially as Jim was killed by a drunk driver there two years ago. Normally I would detour on Vulcan but we didn't want to miss our train.

We were paralleling the train tracks and I knew if we saw a northbound train it was ours and we had missed it. We saw no train and we got to Solana Beach 30 minutes before the train. The serendipitous part of it is that if I had not forgotten my id we would have had to wait 90 minutes for the train instead of 30.

We hadn't planned on riding after 4:30pm but we brought lights and an extra layer of clothing anyway. We ended up riding until 5:40 and it was pitch black and about 60F when we finished. Randonneurs plan for these things.