Jake and Morgan Escape from L.A.

Day 1 – Tuesday February 28, 2017
Miles – 44.6
Start – Our Apartment, Koreatown, Los Angeles, CA
End – Leo Carrillo State Beach

We left our apartment on Feb 28, almost two weeks ago on the last day of our lease. But we haven’t had the motivation to post on here. We’ve been offline. Literally with our phones off or on airplane mode for 95% of the time, except to doublecheck our location, check the weather or send a few texts. We are really liking not using our phones or the internet, so we may not be posting on here as often as originally conceived.

Getting on the road was really hard. The days leading up to our departure were filled with last mintue errands, cleaning our apartment and sorting everything we were taking on the trip. On the 28th, we packed everything up, emptied our apartment, turned in our keys and biked 45 miles to Leo Carillo State Beach. Which is a lot for a first day, or for any day rather. We tried to find a closer place in the city for our first night but couldn’t make it work. Our neighbor took pictures of us in front of our apartment building and saw us off. He was asking questions about our trip and asked how we were going to cook our food, and we realized that we didn’t have a camping stove! We must have accidentally packed it with our belongings that we were storing. So we stopped at the REI in Santa Monica on the way out of town to buy a new one.

We biked into the night, which is a terrifying experience for me. I HATE biking after nightfall. This instance was a little better than I expected in some ways because a) I knew I was going to be biking at night well before nightfall. Part of what I hate about it is being caught in the dark. b) I knew this stretch of road and where we were going pretty well from driving on it several times. The experience was also worse than I expected because there was a almost no streetlamps, almost no moonlight and Jake’s headlight ran out of batteries so he took mine and I went without. I coudn’t see if I was going to bike into a rock or into sand (which I did and it was really scary) and I couldn’t see my map, my bike computer or any road signs, or even white line at the side of the traffic lane. I literally didn’t know where I was. I had to track the tail light of the trailer to trust that I wouldn’t run into anything. I actually was wishing that more traffic would appear so the cars’ headlights could illuminate the road. It was cold and windy. I cried just a little.

And then we arrived! I called out to Jake, “How many more miles do you think it is? Three? I can’t tell how far we’ve gone.” And Jake said, “There it is! I see the sign!” I was in disbelief. I was so happy to be there.

We couldn’t find the hike/bike campsite in the dark so we set up camp in some other site seemingly nearby. We made a delicious pasta dinner with white beans, brocolli and canned tomatoes, and we snuggled into our sleeping bags.

– Morgan