Route 66 Trip, July 16
Horrendous traffic
and a very difficult day, but we have finished Route 66!
We set off from Victorville at about 9am, and immediately found ourselves on a fast freeway with a lot of traffic. Traffic was what we saw a lot of, the whole day -- when we left the freeway after some thirty miles we were on Route 66 but essentially urban sprawl 66. Route 66 nowadays often has lower priority than other highways so you find yourself waiting at stop signs or lights every few hundred yards.
At one point we stopped for fruit juice and decided to take the freeway instead; when we joined that it was so busy that, as was pretty well inevitable, we got split up. Getting off the freeway at Monrovia, Melissa and I waited in vain for Pete. The next rendez-vous was Sunset Boulevard. Eventually when we got there (Melissa leading, reading her satnav with great difficulty in a little plastic pouch rigged on her petrol tank), we did find Pete who had taken a freeway and was tootling up and down Sunset B, looking for us. Relief was on all our faces writ large!
Sunset Strip and Sunset Blvd were full of clogged traffic and roadworks. No sunset. Anyway to cut a long and tiresome story short, we crawled & filtered our way, seeing temperature gauges reading 93, did go through Beverly Hills, Bel Air and all those fancy neighbourhoods,
got through to Santa Monica and at last saw the Pacific. At last we stopped, tired, sweaty, thirsty and hungry at the Pier and were photographed at our official end-point (there seemed to be several end-point signs, actually).
Lunch at the pier with the car party was followed by a few hours looking at Santa Monica,
and it was not until nearly 7pm that we set off towards our motel in Ventura.
To do that we went up the Pacific Coast highway, also clogged with traffic in many sections. At one point, seeing one of my fellow bikers behind me indicating right, I turned right onto Ventura Freeway. At the entrance I stopped and indicated with a gesture -"Is this right?". Little did I realise that my gesture looked like "I know the way, follow me". Anyway after a most exhilarating climb up a winding mountain dual carriageway about ten miles later, we recognised that we were way off the road and that we'd take a lot longer to get into Ventura than originally plannned. At 9pm, tired and cold, Pete led us into our motel.
At this point, what had just been a delayed arrival became more problematic. Pete locked his disk-lock onto the front wheel of his Harley in such a way that it could not be removed. See tomorrow's bit of the saga!