Ever since moving to Downtown Los Angeles I’ve been a biking maniac. As soon as I park my car, it never leaves the garage unless I have to go at least five miles outside the city. I use it to run errands, get dinner, meet up with friends, but mostly I just use it to bike at night, anywhere I can and for as long as I can. There’s nothing like biking thru the downtown Los Angeles streets. The streets are mostly empty at night. They’re flat, and save for the occasional pothole and decades old train track, it’s usually a pretty decent ride. My favorite part of downtown is the industrial district, a place where streets are ugly and beautiful and boring and amazing all at the same time. You can ride for a mile and see nobody, or everyone. For the better part of my time in California, I’ve been exploring all the must-see natural sites like Big Sur, Yosemite and Joshua Tree, but it’s funny to me that I’m as equally awed at being under the shadow of the 4th Street Bridge as I am under the shadows of the giant rocks surrounding Yosemite Valley. 3.5 years ago I would have never dreamed of moving downtown, and made fun of my friend who did. The place sucked, or so I assumed. You move to California to be surrounded by palm trees, not steel. And even though I lived in Hollywood, I never really spent much time there, if that makes sense. I never really found what I was looking for, and so searched elsewhere to get my fix of adventure and something new and beautiful. I haven’t been on a casual hike since I moved downtown. Instead I’m discovering man made genius like the Bradbury. Union Station is a great place to just wander around. Down here, coffee is a dollar everywhere you turn. Cole’s and Sushi Go 55 are the best…and Urth Cafe…who knows if I even would have moved down here it didn’t exist.
Woops. This was only suppose to be a post about how I enjoyed biking downtown, and to show you the above video that I took last night, which is really hard to watch because the video quality suck and it’s super shaky (mounting a camera to your bike really doesn’t work that well. Next time, helmet cam!). It should just give you an idea of some of the things you can see. It looks better in real life, I promise.
If you’re ever downtown on your bike, let me know and I’ll join you. Riding down here is a total blast.
ALSO. I’m really excited about the song in this video. It’s called Swim (To Reach The End) by Surfer Blood, a band from West Palm Beach of all places. Singer sounds strangely like Brian Wilson in parts. I love it. Their album comes out in January, but they’re playing in LA on November 27. I’ll be back home, so let me know how they played.
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