How not to change a tire.

So the good news is I've been doing more riding than blog posting.

March 28th, 2010 I woke up with the very best intentions to ride to the LA "River" in downtown LA and follow the "river" path to Long Beach and back.

One of my favorite parts about riding my bike around Los Angeles is the opportunity to experience neighborhoods that I would otherwise never really venture into. To get to the LA "River" from my house, I had to head east - through the fashion district, the pinata district and the homeless district. There are very few things more humbling at 10am on a perfect Sunday in your perfect life than riding your pretty new bike through blocks and blocks of the homeless, starving, sad, addicted, dirty, tired and otherwise hopeless and helpless community of LA. I can't imagine myself in that situation so I end up with pretty mixed feelings about all of it. On one hand I am deeply saddened by the poverty and the palpable broken human spirits. On the other hand I find myself rejecting the idea of homelessness as something that only happens to people who let it happen to them, people who can't work with the system, people who let themselves get beat by life. Of course this does not work for those people who have no predisposed place in the system like the disabled and mentally ill . . . all this to say that biking affords a lot of time to think and it was both beautiful and heartbreaking to ride past people who have nothing when my biggest concern in life is getting a flat tire on my bike. Bah.

SO past the homeless district is this magical place in Los Angeles that I did not know existed . . . it's the industrial district . . . three miles of open road without a single car or human in sight. Just boarded up warehouse after boarded up warehouse and some of the most beautiful graffiti I have ever seen.

And once you get past all the abandoned buildings you come to a thriving LA landfill just adjacent to the LA "River", which has no bike path in sight.

So now my options are ride along the waterfront and abandoned buildings and landfills (you know, places where little girls disappear in every CSI episode) or turn around and find a new adventure. Doing only what I know best, I about faced on Olympic and set my mind on riding to Sunshine's new house.

Olympic is a beautiful stretch of road and has fewer pot holes than Vermont, so I was happy with this new direction. Even more fun was that Olympic eventually runs directly into Beverly Hills. Sometimes, I think BH is an even more depressing and hopeless place to be than the homeless district. Of course, people here have everything they could ever need and then some as far as, you know, homes and food. . . but much like the homeless, people here feel lost and broken. These two extremes exist less than 10 miles apart and might as well be on totally different planets, yet they have so much in common. This will never cease to amaze me. Seriously, we're talking an 89 cent different in gas prices.

Anyway, I'm thinking I'm headed to Olympic and Overland and taking Overland south to Sunny. Of course the map in my head is not the map in reality and this takes me much further north than I was anticipating. In fact, I wasn't actually sure that Overland and Olympic intersect . . . but they do. So I stopped there to call Sunny, who was thinking of going to a movie. FAIL. So I pump up my tires and head home.

But instead of getting home, I get a mile away and have to pump up my back tire again, and head home.

But instead of getting home, I get a half mile away and have to pump up my tire again. And by pump up my tire I mean call Sunny to come pick me up. I then proceeded to fall asleep on top of my bike in the grass to work on my sexy (and I do mean sexy) bike shorts tan.

FAIL.

Sunny kindly takes me to Palms Cycle to get my tire fixed.

The FANtastic folks at the bike shop (which is filled with attractive men BTW) offer to teach us how to change my tire. YAY! We need this. Of course, we also need the key to my tires since they are not quick release due to a serious bike theft problem in Los Angeles. FAIL.

The good news is that I look so good in my bike shorts that no one at the shop laughed at me for my epic fail, except everyone. Sigh.

I made it about 17 miles on my bike.

Win.