CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
A 536 km loop that starts and ends near Los Angeles, about 7 h 36 of riding. It goes by way of Home Gardens, Idyllwild, Julian and Lakeland Village. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 1,300 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. Long stretches are under trees.
Expect company on a summer weekend. Early is better than fast. For 25 km this is Historic Route 66, a road with a name of its own and a reason for it.
Route 66 does not end in a blaze of glory. After more than three thousand kilometres from Chicago, the old highway frays into the boulevards of Los Angeles, and its last stretch is a patchwork of Foothill Boulevard, Colorado Boulevard and Santa Monica Boulevard, ending officially at the pier in Santa Monica, with the Pacific beyond. The point on the map here is the old centre, where the city began in 1781 as a Spanish pueblo, and a few blocks of adobe buildings and a Mexican market street, Olvera Street, are still standing, near the grand Spanish-style Union Station, which opened in 1939.
Home Gardens is a small unincorporated community squeezed between Corona and Riverside, on the edge of the Santa Ana River valley, and it is a place most people pass through without noticing. It has about eleven thousand people, a mix of houses, small businesses and shopping centres, and it sits close to the Route 91 freeway, one of the busiest and most congested roads in Southern California.
Idyllwild is a mountain village in the San Jacinto range, high above the hot desert of Palm Springs and the sprawling valleys of the Inland Empire, set among tall pines, cedars and oaks at about 1,600 metres. It has a population of a few thousand, a village centre of wooden buildings, cafés and art galleries, and the cool, clean smell of pine that greets you as soon as you arrive.
Julian smells of apples and woodsmoke, and that alone tells you it is not the Southern California of beaches and freeways. The little town sits high in the Cuyamaca Mountains of eastern San Diego County, at roughly 1,300 metres, among oaks and pines, and in winter it occasionally gets a dusting of snow that brings half of San Diego up to look at it.
Lakeland Village is an unincorporated community on the south-western shore of Lake Elsinore, in Riverside County, California. It is not a place most people seek out, but for riders it matters because it sits right at the bottom of the eastern end of the Ortega Highway, State Route 74, one of the most famous and most notorious motorcycle roads in Southern California.
Return visit. Read the place description above.