Matthew’s ALC8 Blog

This started with a nice ride out to Bike Attack in Santa Monica, followed by heading down to Venice Blvd and into Culver City.  Then we turned up towards Beverly Hills, and climbed up to Mulholland.  Unfortunately, the group I was with made a wrong turn (partially because some of the street designers seemed to have named a bunch of the streets the same, and then didn’t sign them all very well).  After we realized the mistake, we decided to keep going over to Sunset, and then try to re-join the path.  Of course we then missed another turn (for a similar reason), and ended up at the bottom of a street called Rosscomore.  The original route would’ve ended up on a street called Stradella which has some major rolling climbs, and ended up back at Rosscomore higher up.  Since getting to the original route from the bottom of Rosscomore would’ve been much longer, we decided to head up Rosscomore.

That was not at all fun.

Rosscomore gets extremely steep on the way up, where I dropped below 4 miles per hour, and eventually ended up walking up the last quarter mile, the first and only time training that I have done so.  After reaching the top, we continued over on Mulholland to Beverly Glen, where we stopped near the top for lunch.  After lunch, a bunch of us decided to head straight down Beverly Glen to have some fun instead of heading back along Mulholland to Sepulveda.  We then worked our way back to Santa Monica mostly along Olympic.  After returning to Bike Attack I arranged to meet with my parents in the Abbot Kinney area for lunch, but since I had some time to kill, I took a fairly casual ride along the bike path in Venice and enjoyed the sights, then heading up Washington Blvd to Abbot Kinney, and heading over to the meeting area.

On the way over, I passed them by car while talking to them on the phone.  I then turned around and caught up to them turning left, and rode with them while they were looking for parking (traffic was quite heavy, so it was easy to keep up).  After not finding parking, we headed over to a restaurant on Washington Blvd, and after enjoying a nice 2nd lunch (I ate over at the top of Mulholland), and a quick stop at a furniture store, I headed back home via Washington Blvd/Washington Pl, then joining my normal commute in Culver City, making for a nice day and ride.  The trip home was also fun because I encountered a car in downtown Culver City, then I then managed to keep the same average speed all the way up La Cienega to at least Olympic.  Gotta love the traffic (when you’re not stuck in it 😉 ).

Climbs of the Rich and Famous (click to view full detail)