Finds from the Grind - Up and Down and River Side

More river bike path scenes from April 22 with lots of volunteers cleaning up the LA River and me dodging shopping carts.

My usual route for the LA River Trail includes the Arroyo Seco, so going towards the LA River means a clockwise route while trying to take the Arroyo Seco path second means a counter-clockwise kind of motion. If I go one way a particular week, I like to go the other way the next time I'm on those same roads. So it was on this day.

The fun of it meant that I got to go down Chevy Chase into Glendale. The windy bits are near the summit and this is usually where I can stay ahead of the cars, but then they can slow me down since I can out-corner them.

April 22nd was also Earth Day, which usually gets a bleh reaction from me because festivals and rallies on this day produce massive amounts of garbage and litter on the ground. That's why I appreciated the Friends of the LA River volunteer group who organized a cleanup day with hundreds of people coming in to pick up the debris and flotsam from all the Winter storms. That's real activism in my eyes: doing stuff yourself instead of the hand-waving "raising awareness" crap where you try to persuade other people to do stuff for you.

I also tried out that new bike path leading up to the roundabout at San Fernando and Riverside. I'm still confused how a cyclist is supposed to continue straight onto Figueroa the "correct" way, since the path appears to guide you onto San Fernando going North. I think I'll just go play in traffic from now on.

On last week's ride, I noted how many shopping carts there were on the Arroyo Seco Bike Path. Someone started collecting them near the entry near South Pasadena, but they missed a prominent one in the middle of the road.