A portion of the San Luis Rey River trail

I'll make this quick - I'm tired and want to go to bed!

There's a nice trail that starts near the Guajome Regional Park which is near the Vista/Oceanside border on N. Santa Fe Avenue. It's just like the ATT trail in North Carolina, but with lots of underpasses instead of crossings over neighborhood streets. We started our ride after dinner, so I knew we didn't have much time and wouldn't be able to ride the whole thing. And once we got started, about 3 miles into the ride, Eliza began to get cold and all I had was a lightweight sweater for her that I'd packed into the Weehoo saddlebags. I put it on her, but she was still too chilly to continue, so that decided my turn-around point!

The most interesting thing we saw on our ride today was a partially burned out house with a completely charred wooden playset in its backyard! The house backed up to the trail, and the fence was chain link, so we could completely see everything. Eliza wanted me to stop so she could stare at it. She looked like she was going to cry! She asked me if those people who lived there would get their playset fixed! I told her I didn't know, but most likely they would.

Here's our Strava summary of our ride. As you can see, this is a nice flat ride!

Riding to visit 2 fun parks with playgrounds

So we started this ride from home and I realized something today - no matter which way I leave for bike rides around our neighborhood, there's a big hill that must be conquered first. Either I climb up Lupine Hills, which is steeper and little bit shorter, or I climb up Sycamore, which is less steep but lasts longer. I have yet to explore what the roads are like if I travel north of where we live. But looking at the hills that surround seemingly ALL of Vista, and the fact that Vista means "view" in Spanish, and the only way to have a view is to be UP HIGH on a hill, umm, yeah, I'll let that speak for itself! Climb, climb, climb! I guess I will get back in shape quickly living here. I used to have to actively search for good hills to train on when we lived in North Carolina!

We rode first to go check out the park called South Buena Vista Park. It's located down in a valley down under S. Melrose Ave, so it's not that kind of park that you'd see just from driving past it. You turn onto Dawson Drive, and immediately, like 25 feet from the corner of Melrose, you turn into a driveway. There's a sign that points you down the hill with an arrow and the words "park" on it. That driveway does downhill quickly and dead ends into a parking lot. There's a cool gated playground with lots of fun things to climb, some great slides and a few swings. Outside of the fenced in playground is the off-leash dog park. So while playing on the play structure, we got to see quite a few dogs having fun running around.

Here's a picture of this playground. (It's not my picture. I just found this on Google. I sadly didn't take any pictures on my ride today)

After having fun at this park, we set off to ride to another park. Climbing UP that steep driveway to get back out to Dawson/Melrose was so physically challenging, I almost saw some stars! One pitch of this climb was a 20% grade! Okay, once I got my breath back and stopped seeing stars, we headed towards the next park - Sunset Park. This park is just past the city limits of Vista and is in San Marcos. It's located off of La Mirada Drive, which included another killer climb of the ride. Whew, all this climbing is killing me! Or maybe it's doing the exact opposite - getting me in shape! Sunset Park was nice and new and the play structure was interesting. I made a video of Eliza going down the slide at this park, but I haven't uploaded it to YouTube yet. Maybe later!

Here's a picture of the playground at Sunset Park. Again, this is not my picture. I nabbed it from doing a quick Google image search.

Here's our Strava summary of today's ride. As you can see, it had a TON of climbing! But it was a fun ride.

Here's to more fun bike rides in the future!

Our first beach ride

We're going to love living near the beach. I just know it. It's just so pretty out here. Rob already loves the beach because he grew up here. I, on the other hand, grew up in Northern California, so I would only see the beach occasionally, and it was at least an hour's drive away, so I'm not as a big of a "beach person" as Rob is. But from what I'm feeling every time I see the beach since moving here, I can't deny that I get kinda giddy and feel like a kid again. I just want to run towards the ocean and dive in head first!

Rob had a work try-out of sorts today at a local bike shop in Encinitas, so Eliza and I drove him into work and brought our bike and Weehoo. The bike shop was only a few blocks away from Moonlight Beach, which is a great area to start a beach bike ride. The Coast Highway 101 is a very popular cycling route, with the majority of the ride from Moonlight Beach to Del Mar Powerhouse having separate striped bike lanes.

Here's some pictures from our bike ride. Note the beautiful beach scenes in the background in some of these photos!

I have a lot of pictures from this ride. I guess you could say that I was pretty excited to ride in such a beautiful place! Eliza liked it a lot, too. She especially liked seeing the Coaster trains and Amtrak's that would pass by us every so often. In fact, I had to take a picture of one of the trains as it passed by us at the Del Mar Powerhouse area because she said she "wanted to show Daddy the picture of the Coaster train". So cute!

Since we've only been home less than a week, we still have most of our belongings packed away in boxes in the garage. This weekend we'll be getting a storage shed unit for some of our stuff. As you can see from the picture of me, I'm not wearing a jersey, because the only jersey I packed for myself for the move across country was my Chico State jersey. I wore it when we rode in Colorado last week, and I still haven't done all the laundry from our trip, so...cycling in a t-shirt was what I had to do today!

Here's the final 3 pictures from today's ride. This beach ride is so nice and I think I'll be doing it again sometime soon.

Here's our Strava summary. As you can see, there's very little climbing on this ride. Oh, and I feel that I should point out that I've been riding exclusively with 2.2 width mountain bike tires, so yeah, I could be a little faster if I put my 'cross tires on, but right now, it's not about how fast I am, it's about enjoying the ride. And I enjoy riding these tires.

After our ride, we walked down to the beach, found a shady spot to lay under, dug in the sand for a while, and dipped our feet in to cool off. Next time we do this ride, I think I'll have to pack our swimsuits and towels, too!