UPDATE: Saturday, March 9 - Re-Re:Entry

[The Passage Announcements]

** Note the change in plan **

Re-Re:Entry
Saturday, March 9
Antelope Valley Metrolink from Union Station departs at 8:39am
Ride starts at Santa Clarita station at ~9:45am

Okay, I had thought rain ending on Wednesday would mean that the trails down in OC would surely be open by Saturday. Except the rain didn't end on Wednesday; it ended yesterday: Thursday. And I guess they have generally been waiting 48+ hours after rain to reopen trails down there. Which means tomorrow, Saturday? The trails are probably still going to be closed.

So we're just going to roll with the punches and switch to a different route: Passage #200 - Re:Entry. This one is far less trail-heavy and less climb-heavy. It is much more about looping in and out and through and around the uncanny wilds of suburbia. But, worry not, there are still some trails and some climbs — if trails and climbs are your jam — and plenty of sights and sites and non-sites and such. Yes, yes.

-

The details:

- Antelope Valley Metrolink train departs at 8:39am. Arrive at the train in the morning with a ticket in hand. The Metrolink app is pretty convenient, but there are ticket machines at Union Station too. Buy a weekend day pass for $10. Again, we're now taking the Antelope Valley line.

- If you want to drive instead, our train should arrive at the Santa Clarita station around 9:40. We will only wait there until ~9:45 before starting, so make sure you are present when we show up. (We are actually returning from the Newhall station, but the two are ~5 miles from each other, so I recommend just parking at Santa Clarita. Alternatively, you could park in Newhall and jump on our train for one stop to get to Santa Clarita in the morning.)

- The route is approx. 30 miles. Only about a mile or so is off-road, with a pretty steep hill that I recall carrying bikes up last night around.

- We will stop for lunch (there is an In-N-Out Burger and a grocery store nearby) in the early afternoon.

- Not sure which one we'll make — depends on speed of group, if there are flats, etc. — but there are return trains at 2:28, 3:28, 4:28, 6:28, and 7:28. I sure hope we catch one of the first three (first one is unlikely, but the next two are possibilities). It takes about an hour to get back to Union Station.

- The route loops around a lot, so it is actually relatively easy to bail early if you need to for some reason.

- Bring water and snacks. Bring sunscreen. Bring lights. Bring layers of clothing.

-

This was the original ride announcement when we did this route in 2013:

I don't know where Nathan spent his first two years in Southern California, but I spent mine in Santa Clarita. I was going to school and, though I had a car for the first time in my life, having previously been a lifelong pedestrian, public transit rider, and cyclist, the prospect of living in the city and commuting up to Valencia sounded absurd. So I spent two years in the community of Edward Scissorhands, the community of Weeds.

And yet, being in grad school, I didn't really have time to explore all that much. And what exploration I did was mostly done in the way someone in a car explores: I drove around a lot, yet saw relatively little. It was all destination and little in the way of journey.

When school was over I fully intended to move back east. Life however, as the cliché goes, had other plans. A job opening opened, I applied, was hired, and after a brutal month of commuting to the city from the 'burbs, I became a resident of Los Angeles.

Fast forward almost ten years. I hadn't really given Santa Clarita much thought in the interim. I had visited my school's library a couple times, gone to a couple art openings there. One time I took the train up and rode down to the city. But I had more or less left the suburb two valleys to the north behind.

Then, last year at AFI Fest, I saw a documentary about a group of teenagers growing up there. It showed them hanging out in abandoned hillside houses, defunct mini golf courses [sadly gone now, in 2024], concrete civic infrastructure. Well, okay, now you've got my attention. I knew I needed to get up there again, take another look. This ride is the result.

So, in a way, it is a return to a beginning -- a fitting exercise for an anniversary. A lot has changed in the nearly ten years since I left but mostly it feels about the same. Sprawl. Sprawling houses and barren, sprawling hills. And weird border spaces between the two: dead zones, spaces in plain view which one tends to edit from one's sight. Santa Clarita is the collision of sanitized suburbia and wild, open spaces, of strip malls and oil fields, of wide expanses of asphalt and wide expanses of brush -- ready to burn when the summer gets hot. Its extreme weirdness is masked by extreme boringness. "It's a nice place to raise a family." There's a lot of beige brick.

The ride has changed a bit too. We go a little farther than we used to, riding perhaps a little faster. Nathan is now known for the hilly routes (I've grown lazy!). We no longer have those weeks when the ride is just us and maybe one or two other people. But, on balance, things also remain unchanged: baroque routes, conceptual conceits, bridges, tunnels, hills, off-roading, disorientation, etc., etc. Always the same in that it is always a bit different.

This week, in celebration of our 200th ride, we begin the four-week cycle of rides outside our normal territory. We begin in Santa Clarita, where I began my time as a Southern Californian. We will twist our way through its streets and along its trails and, as ever, keep our eyes open for the unusual, the unexpected.