Beach

Didn’t get discovered at the beach.
It took awhile for me to get functional. And I’m still seeing friends all over the place. But I finally got down to the beach. Unfortunately it was fairly late. I parked the car, got out and realized that the Santa Monica beach is very cold. I wandered through the pier a bit, and then noticed that south of it, the temperature was much nicer. So I went back to the car, changed, and started running to Venice Beach. Three miles away.
Venice Beach is much more of a destination than Santa Monica. If I had life to live over (and a better sense of how to commute in L.A.) I would have driven to Venice Beach and started the run there.
The area along the beach is full of kitsch stores. It’s like an army of hippies all descended on the place at once and made it their own. But a better mental image might be Whyte Avenue. Only more Whyte, in a non-supremacist way. And an outdoor weight training gym plunked in the middle. (Muscle Beach.)
It is nothing like Venice, Italy. Unless you replaced the road with canals, and upped the price and quality of everything by 1000. (Level of usefulness is about the same.) I found it more similar to Nice. But that was giving me flashbacks to my collision with bicycles there.
It wasn’t that nice to run in the shopping area. And I probably shouldn’t have, but the lane was separated into bicycle and pedestrian, and the pedestrian one went right into the mass of hippy shoppers. Still, I got the amount of the ambiance that I would care for. I am not that good at window shopping.
I did the run all the way out to the end of the pier. If this was a movie, inspirational music would have been playing. There was a nice view. I stopped and watched a surfer try to catch a wave. It took several minutes before he found one he liked, and then he wiped out in five seconds. Wasting my time.
On the way back, the sun set behind the clouds. I got a nice vibrant sunset. The Santa Monica pier lit up nicely, with the fairground on it. However, it was like running River Valley Road and seeing the High Level Bridge in the distance. It never seems to get closer.
But, as all things do, it came to an end. I wandered around Santa Monica pier. I was tempted to go into the Bubba Gump restaurant, but that is an event restaurant. And you can’t go there on your own. In the end, lunch (at 6:00 in the evening) was a hot dog.
This is why I would have preferred to start from the other end. Venice Beach looked like it had a lot nicer places to eat and things to look at.