This past week was the final stretch! After getting through LA, the miles flew by pretty quickly. Wednesday we rode to an Airbnb in Costa Mesa, near Newport Beach.
Lots of riding on the beach through LA!
This is a terrible picture, but documentation that we tried In-and-Out Burger at least once.
Stopping for a cold drink in Long Beach.
Just sandy, sunny riding all day!
The next morning, Thursday, we left Costa Mesa with plans to ride to San Onofre State Beach, about 30 miles south.
Riding out of Costa Mesa. So many palm trees!
Stopping for....a milkshake. This was definitely still the morning. I’d call it a breakfast shake.
We didn’t get a ton of pictures from this day, but long story short, we got to San Onofre and the campground was pretty terrible. Hot, sunny, no shade, pinned between a nuclear plant and a Marine base. We got there around 2pm, took a look around, and decided we should just keep going further south. We wound up riding another 30 miles further to get to San Elijo State Park near Encinitas.
We also don’t have anything to document our ride through Camp Pendleton! This Marine base allows cyclists to ride through if they submitted a request/background check (which we did) - the only other way through would be to ride along I-5. They don’t want you to stop, take pictures, etc. but the ride is at least 10 miles to get through the base. Our first time seeing road signs for tank crossings! We also rode right past several Howitzer teams doing live drills. It was definitely a surreal experience.
Went for a quick swim once we got to San Elijo. The water was warm!
San Elijo had a beautiful beach, but as far as campgrounds go, it wasn’t much better than San Onofre. We were camped on the other side of a chain link fence separating the park from a highway and railroad tracks. Freight trains ran through the park all night long. And we woke up to discover our tent, bikes, and everything else covered in ants!
Our feelings in the morning after no sleep and trying to get roughly one million ants out of all our things.
We had been debating what day we’d actually ride to the border, but Friday morning we decided we were just going to do it that day - about 50 miles to get to the border. So close!
Starting with coffee and pastries in Cardiff. Our mood improved dramatically!
Friday morning we rode through the northern San Diego suburbs, including La Jolla, before getting down to the waterfront and a quick ferry to Coronado to finish the ride to the border.
We bumped into Sabine again on the ferry! She’s the German who’s been riding the same route as us. After finishing this ride, she’s going back up to Oregon and is going to start biking east across the US!
View from the ferry.
After getting to Coronado, we had about 20 more miles of riding to get to the border.
Riding along Silver Strand Beach.
On the other side of that fence is Tijuana!
We made it!
We decided not to cross the border, mainly because we knew it would take a long time to get through and back, and we wanted to get back to San Diego for the night. We got on the trolley, San Diego’s metro train, at San Ysidro and rode back into the city.
So we finished the ride - Canada to Mexico! The total came out to 1,979.3 miles. We’re both still in shock that the ride is actually over!
The neighborhood we’re staying in in San Diego.
Celebrating Friday night with one well-earned margarita. Not pictured: how we promptly fell asleep at 8:30pm that night.
Yesterday, Saturday, we did some laundry, took all our gear to UPS to ship home (one 65lb box!), and dropped our bikes at a bike store that will pack them and ship them back to our bike shop in Chicago for a tune-up.
Bye, bikes!
Now we’re just hanging out in San Diego until our flight home on Monday!