Happy at home

Date: Aug. 19 and 21
Mileage: 52.4 and 44.3
August mileage: 425.2

I was working my way through one of many cattle shoots at LAX early this morning when a man behind me pointed to gray mass hovering over the airport outside the window and asked "is that smog or fog?"

"It looks like fog to me," I said. Then the woman in front of me turned around and said, "Oh no, that's smog." I just glanced out the window again at the cloud, somewhat amused that, regardless of what it actually was, I was in a place where it's hard to tell the difference.

And with that, I left California after what feels like a short lifetime but was actually just a long week of fun in the sun.


My cute family on the Matterhorn. My 26-year-old sister, Lisa (not pictured), was deeply traumatized by this ride when she was 4 years old. So the mechanized abominable snowman has made its way into family lore, and the ride is now a fam favorite.

So after my mom informed me they had purchased Disneyland tickets for the whole fam-damily, I did not admit to her that I was not excited about going ... especially on my birthday, especially when I had acquired a perfectly good if flat-prone bicycle that, despite the fact I ride all the time, I really just wanted to take out for a long day of exploring. But my mom loves Disneyland. Don't get me wrong ... I loved it too, as a kid. But my adult paradigm started to run against that grain and now I feel uncomfortable around all of the excess and crowds, who, as my dad quoted from an article, "single-handedly prove that the American economy is doing just fine when all of these people are paying so much money just to amuse themselves." Disneyland really plays up that "When You Wish Upon A Star" theme, which I think could serve as a thinly veiled slogan for the most toxic edge of the American Dream - that we should have everything we want handed to us out of thin air. That said, I'm certainly not a poster child for eschewing all over-consumption, and I can enjoy excess with the best of them.

After an ill-advised trip down Splash Mountain, my sisters get a small taste of what it's like to be a cyclist in Juneau.

Plus, Disneyland is just so nostalgic. It took me a while to get over the hump of herding myself through masses of humanity and exhausting my energy reserves by standing in long lines, but I finally hit my stride and started to really appreciate the time I could spend with my two sisters, who I never see anymore, and just enjoy the oddball way in which two 50-somethings and their three grown, childless offspring can enjoy a warm day of youthful amusement.

I don't know about the "Happiest Birthday on Earth." The crowdedest, maybe.

Thursday was a much more even day. I crawled out of bed early and rode my borrowed bike up the coastal highway to Long Beach, only to discover that the coastal highway through Long Beach is a high-traffic commercial zone that veers pretty far inland. Live and learn. We took a surfing lesson in the afternoon, where I learned how to get thoroughly battered in small waves by something that is considerably heavier than a boogie board. I was finally hitting my stride and nearly standing up on the board when the lesson ended two hours later. I'll likely never try it again - it's too hard for me to work through my irrational fear of moving water just to get out there in the first place. But, as my sister Sara said, at least we can knock "Try surfing" off our bucket list.

Oh yes, I took a picture of the picture.

I flew back into Juneau at 2 p.m. Friday. As usual, the city was obscured between a predictable but almost comforting blanket of fog. I was sleepy and mentally exhausted from 10 hours of airline transit, but I couldn't wait to suit up over my sun-blistered lips and unusually tan face and head out for a ride in the rain. I couldn't decide where to go. Muddy Perseverance? Sloppy Eaglecrest? Soggy trip to the glacier? They all sounded so appealing, and I feel like I haven't been here in weeks. I'm sure that feeling will wear off soon, but for now I will head out an enjoy it. In the same way I warmed up to Disneyland, these first few post-vacation rides in Juneau may prove my theory - that novelty and nostalgia are the perfect combination.

29

Today's my birthday.

I'm going to Disneyland.

It's true. Hope I live.

Vacationy post

I realize that the following photographs are probably interesting to nobody but me. But that's what vacations are about ... having a good day and wanting to remember it, so you take your stand-and-grin family photos and post them on your blog.

I hooked up today with three riders from the area, readers of this very blog who offered to not only lend me a (very nice) bicycle for three days, but also took me on a morning tour of the area. The man who lent me his cyclocross bike, Mark, told me he didn't want me to go home and write the usual "IHATELA" visitor news. I have to say, the sprawl of humanity that covers the area freaked me out at first, but I'm really warming up to Southern California. We started in Huntington Beach and headed down the Pacific Coast Highway (I called it the "PCH" and my mom said "That sounds so Californian!"). We rode to Laguna Beach and then up the canyon to Irvine, rolling through some bike-path-laced hills back toward the PCH. Fun, really mellow ride, something short of 50 miles, a little daunting with all of the traffic and two flat tires, but a refreshing and scenic taste of this piece of California. Thanks guys!

We all went to In-N-Out Burger for lunch. Their menu is, um ... limited. Sorry guys, I still don't understand the hype. But it was a fun lunch. And a great ride. This is the best aspect of being part of the cycling community - no matter where you are, you have friends.

My two little sisters flew in this morning. Just about the time they came in, every single one of the clouds in the overcast sky had burned off. Just like that. In Juneau, that kind of cloud dissipation takes weeks. I was shocked. We hit up the beach first thing.

Later, we talked them into a group bike ride with the three working bicycles we had dug up, and one that had a wobbly front wheel and off-set (and rusted permanently that way) handlebars. This picture illustrates well what my sisters thought about the bike riding.

Before the midway point of our five-mile ride, the rear brake arm on Sara's Wal-mart mountain bike snapped off and the front pads were so worn they didn't work anyway. We turned around a limped home, with Sara bombing into the grass just to stop, my dad attempting to perfect the skewed steering of the wobbly wonder, my mom pedaling some bike that made loud grinding noises with every turn of the crank, me being yelled at by a passing (not oncoming) cyclist for riding into "his" lane in the 5 mph-max zone as I was trying to help Sara, and the whole time I felt really bad about riding the good bike, which no one wanted to ride because it had drop handlebars. But we laughed about it all the way home. Yes, we tourists are silly.

But that's what it's all about.