Day 29: Carpinteria to Leo Carrillo State Beach

A perfect day for riding, sunny & cool. The route hugged the coastline again, leaving Santa Barbara County to enter Ventura County. Busy freeway riding, with adjacent bike paths or actual bike lanes on the freeway.

Found a wounded monarch, carefully picked it up and moved it from the roadway. Such a fragile, beautiful thing. No match for 80 mile an hour traffic.

Upon entering Ventura, I rode one of the nicest bike paths yet, right along the surf. Check out the video:

Then on through a community of multi-million dollar houses, each with its own yacht mooring. These must be the 1%, as defined by the Occupy Wall Street movement. Or are they? Don’t rich folks also depend on an economy that is moving, in order to funnel the money up to afford their mansions and yacht payments?

Left the yachts behind and continued for miles on Highway 1 as it faded back into a two lane rural road, traveling through farm fields and rounding a naval air base.

At the base I found a stunning display of cold war weaponry, including the Polaris and several other “payload delivery systems”. Strange coincidence: at Esalen I sat with a man who had served on a nuclear sub during the cold war, staying underwater for three months at a time. He described constant nuclear launch drills, how the crew was trained over and over to go through the launch procedure, only at the end knowing whether they would be launching their missiles or not.

The submarine crew became numb to the fact that they might be doing something that would forever change the world. Nuclear deterrence. Defending the 1%.