Our time on the west coast is drawing to an end and I’ve neglected to blog. I apologize for this thoughtless behavior and I’ll catch you up to date. I’ll start with a stunning sunrise that I captured from the rooftop.

Things began with a proper celebration of Roger’s big birthday! A birthday ride with donuts and later dinner out at The Side Door, our favorite place.

The weekend after the birthday we saw the annual Pacific Airshow at Huntington Beach. It’s a very difficult event to get pics, I’ll share only one, plus the Balboa Banana we shared on the way home from the show!

The weekend of fun local events continued with the 60th Annual Newport Beach Sandcastle Contest. The theme was “California Dreamin'” and the creations were pretty spectacular.

We love to celebrate and we continued the Birthday celebration with dinner and a show. We went to a new (for us) theater for our fifth live performance of our favorite show, Hamilton!

Two weeks into our time on the West Coast we we hit the 4000-mile mark on the bike. The quest for our annual goal of 5000 will continue back home. We still think we can do it – we’ll need some mild weather upon our return.

Riding with other tandems is obviously one of our favorite things. We are lucky enough to ride with Britt and Kevin each time we are in town. A ride and lunch date is one of our weekly highlights.

Sometimes Dennis and Kathy join us and we ride the bike paths of the OC with pleasant company.

This trip included three remote starts. Twice we rode with the SCOOTERS (Southern Californians Out On Tandems). These club rides had great turnouts (more than a dozen bikes each time) and we enjoyed the experience. The first weekend we rode Silverado Canyon which was a climb!

Apparently the Silverado Canyon climb ends when you circle “the tree” at the top and then you can check it off your list and begin the descent! Thanks for Delphine for snapping shots (and sharing them) of us circling the tree.

The next week was a SCOOTERS Octoberfest ride and celebration starting in Glendora!

One more remote start took us to Dana Point for a ride along the coast, through San Clemente and into Camp Pendleton.

We celebrated Mitzi’s birthday (in abstentia) with a visit to a donut store – how else would we celebrate?

And I can’t close without discussing Halloween! We like to ride to Seal Beach for the annual celebration. The little ones trick or treat at the local businesses, and it’s adorable. The city goes all out and decorates.

And this is the third year of our candy chute, a Covid work-around which turned out to be a big hit and a keeper!

I’ll close with an image of the most spectacular sunset we had for our six weeks in paradise! It happened on Halloween while we were sending candy down the chute! We are currently closing up the house and getting ready for departure.

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