urban bicycle journeys

My son Jack has been living in San Diego.  Myself and the rest of our family, plus Sam’s girlfriend Layla, all went out there for Christmas.  On Christmas Day we walked out on the pier in Ocean Beach.

On December 26, I got away for a thirty something mile bike loop around the the southern sprawl of the San Diego area. I began by biking a few blocks from our downtown hotel to a small ferry that crosses San Diego Bay to Coronado.

I biked up to Hotel del Coronado, which opened in 1888. My mother says her great-grandfather Joseph Spoor, who was a recent immigrant from England, was one of the principal wood carvers on the interior woodwork of this hotel.

South of the hotel, there are a few blocks of Towers in the Park. South of that, there is a nice bike path that parallels an empty oceanfront road down the barrier island, about fifteen miles south to Imperial Beach, where one can cross back to the mainland.

Imperial Beach:  Tijuana, Mexico sits on the opposing hill, watching over a working class neighborhood.:

Once away from the beach, this is not the trendy side of San Diego. Posh La Jolla is many miles to the north. On this side of the bay there is a nice bike path, twisting through concrete canyons and industrial sites, before depositing me on the south side of the large U.S. Navy base.

Once past the Navy base, there are suprising areas of non-gentrified turn of the twentieth century buildings, circling the south side of downtown San Diego. I got back to the downtown hotel just before dark.