I’ve been get­ting up very ear­ly so have been alter­nat­ing days between walk­ing over to and along the beach or going for a 40 minute bike ride. This morn­ing it was off to Sum­mer­land. Tried some­thing new this morn­ing. I put an earplug in my free­way side ear. It was very help­ful in cre­at­ing a more peace­ful ride.

I got up ear­ly to ride down to break­fast at the Cajun Kitchen and remem­bered to take my cam­era so stopped along the way to take a few shots. I’m always fas­ci­nat­ed by the flare stack just south of the Rin­con and it being ear­ly took a few shots of it from far and near. The last three are pret­ty fun too, a Shas­ta trail­er won by the own­ers on the tele­vi­sion show “Let’s Make a Deal” in 1961!

As I rode by the mouth of the Ven­tu­ra Riv­er I was shocked by how much it has changed since I had seen it over many years as a peace­ful sandy lagoon with very few rocks. Click on the images below to see how things used to be then watch my short YouTube for what has hap­pened recently.

Union Pacif­ic was doing a lot of track main­te­nance and upgrad­ing as I rode by. One of the more inter­est­ing units was this track tam­per, I think quite fas­ci­nat­ing. I found the YouTube below show­ing how the machine works. Here is the descrip­tion that with the orig­i­nal YouTube: “The mech­a­nism on the front lets the rest of machine know how much a cer­tain sec­tion of track needs to be raised. Then, a claw picks up the rail and ties and spikes poke down into the bal­last, push­ing it under the track. Once the tam­per com­plet­ed its job, a bal­last reg­u­la­tor came through to smooth out the rocks.”

I rode down to Ven­tu­ra for lunch then, on the way home, decid­ed to take the time to explore an old tun­nel cross­ing under the free­way. The tun­nel is about a mile and a half south of Mus­sel Shoals, near the south­ern ter­mi­na­tion of the new bike­way. As you can see from the images the tun­nel cross­ing was not what I expect­ed. Click on any image for a larg­er ver­sion com­plete with commentary.