Yesterday Amber and I planned to ride from Anaheim Amtrak to Solana Beach Amtrak and take the train back. This was to be our pre-Colorado 400k long climbing ride. It was not to be.
We're currently at the tail-end of a heat wave. Most of last week has seen record-breaking high temps here in the Southland and a spate of wildfires in San Diego county. We started early to try to avoid climbing Santiago Canyon in the worst of the heat. Caltrans decided to close the 91 freeway on Saturday morning (defund them!) so it took 20 minutes for me to get the two miles around the closure.
We left Anaheim a little later than I had hoped but I'm not sure it made much difference. It was still over 80 even by 9am. We got to Cook's Corner before 11am which meant we could have breakfast. Amber had their amazing French toast and I had a breakfast burrito. We met some northbound cyclists who told us that Camp Pendleton was closed to cyclists because of the fire. We don't like riding on the shoulder of the I5 even though it is legal, so we decided to catch the train at San Clemente instead.
The ride down the Alisal bike trail was as wonderful as normal and we popped out at the coast just north of Dana point. Heading south we were soon in San Clemente with almost three hours to burn. I was suffering from the heat and the remnants of a cold so I decided we needed to try a coffee shop that I've always wanted to checkout. I think it's called the Kahaluka or something. Anyhow I had a banana smoothie (to ward off incipient cramps) and iced coffee. Very nice.
We ran into Linda Cammell there with some friends. They started in Corona and rode down to San Clemente using almost the same route as us except they don't know where the Alisal Creek bike trail is. I will mail her the GPS file. I notice the Metrolink runs more frequently than Amtrak and has far better bike facilities. I'm going to look into that - especially in light of what happened when we tried to board an earlier train (read on).
There are two stations at San Clemente - one Amtrak and one Metrolink - weird. Thank goodness for smart phones and GPS systems. We had a hilly climb to get to the Amtrak station and on one of the hills my chain broke. It's a brand new chain with maybe 400 miles on it. It looks like the mechanic didn't align the pin correctly and it slipped out of one side of the link.
Three days ago I bought a chain tool. I fixed the chain in about 10 minutes. I haven't broken a chain for years. What are the odds I would break one a few days after buying a chain tool?
We got to the correct train station and waited for the next train. The conductor was a prick and wouldn't let us on because we had reservations for the next train. He had empty spots but still wouldn't let us on. We decided to ride up to San Juan Capistrano which is the next stop and catch our train there. Our GPS systems showed us the way.
San Juan Capistrano is a lovely small town - very much like San Luis Obispo. We waited there, listening to live guitar music from the café next to the station. It was very pleasant. The time for our train came and went - Amber checked the train status on her iPhone. It was running an hour late because an earlier train had broken down. Eventually it showed up and took us back to Anaheim. There were a lot of people on the train headed to Anaheim for the baseball game. I bet they were mad.
So we relied on having the right tools several times during the ride. The broken chain; monitoring a late train; last-minute route changes, all these issues were handle adroitly by having the right tools with us.
No comments:
Post a Comment