Cycling Cazalea: One Way, or Not At All

I went riding early Sunday morning. This is a departure for me, as I'm usually at church on Sunday morning. But I went to a Saturday night service last night, and decided to ride before it got hot and sunny on one of the first days of summer.

I cruised by John Noble's shop - he's a native plant guy who helped redo our back yard 10 years ago.

I checked out his plants, then as I rode off, casually thought "No Mustang convertibles at this time of day; I won't have to bother looking for them driving by."

The title of this blog comes from the fact that I found myself on streets going the opposite direction of my normal route. You must have experienced the same thing - you go to the store one way, then return home using other streets (as a result of odd traffic signals, other errands, etc).

So I rode up the RV Canyon, a section of road I'd previously only ridden down. I stopped to look at some locks fastened to the chain link fence and watched a policeman try to stop (with lights flashing) an inattentive motorist.

Next, I went onto a street I'd never visited, then back across Catalina and up a one-way street (the wrong way) because there were no cars out. It's an old odd little pocket of streets reaching down into a funny canyon. The density of houses, apartments, shacks, dead cars, etc. on Whittier and Banning is astonishing. This street had formerly been a very heavily-traveled route, but the traffic was diverted about 20 years ago and now it's a backwater dead-end and the traffic passes it by.

A few blocks away, I saw that a long-vacant lot had been turned into an organic garden farm, complete with compost heaps, chicken coops, and above-ground beds.