So, this day was a nice, quiet Sunday. I woke up feeling a bit off though. Recent events had left me feeling a bit anguished about some stuff. It was nothing horribly serious but I felt the need to go someplace alone for a while to refresh my mood and clear my mind a bit. Add to that the fact that we were about to get a 10 day long storm system in Southern California and well, I knew I should get Frankie out for a bit too. He's been feeling a bit cooped up since his surgery and with all this rain heading our way I figured I should get him out on a bit of an adventure while I still could. So, we headed to the Santa Ana River Trail.
A while back I had taken him to my bank with me which is right near one of the entrances to the trail. So, while we were there I thought we would check it out. We took a short stroll and I thought it looked like a nice place to walk and vowed to take him there in the future for a longer more explorative walk. But I never did. Until today.
I am really loving this challenge to do more new things. It has really made me more open to doing things that I have been thinking about but not actually doing and also to doing things that I would've ordinarily turned down even though I didn't have a really good excuse to turn them down. And as a result I have had a lot more fun and some very interesting experiences. In short, it has accomplished it's goal of making my life a bit richer and the month is not even over! And now that I have a list of new things to do, it's only going to get better!
So, back to the river. It is almost hard to call it a river most of the year, it's quite dry and sandy most of the time. We had had a bit of rain last week so, there were a few little pools of water here and there, but for the most part it was still quite dry when we were there. As I am typing this it has been pouring rain for almost 24 hours so, I am sure it probably looks a little more river like by now and I am hoping to get there during the storms to take a photo or two of it with actual water in it. It's still a cement river though so, instead of the water seeping into the dry dessert land around it it just funnels out to the ocean. Sigh.... But that's not what this post is about.
Right where we started our walk there is a fireman training site. There is a 9/11 Memorial on the back wall that faces the riverbed. It's quite touching. A good reminder. It's the building to the left in this photo. You can also see the big "A" from Angel Stadium to the right.
The river runs mostly through cities all the way out to the pacific, so there are streets, freeways and buildings all around. It's right smack in the middle of concrete and cities and yet the smell near the river bed reminded me of the smell of the wetlands near the beach. The path itself has some pretty nature filled parts with trees and bushes and plants as well as a lot of concrete overpasses for the freeways and streets that cross it. As I said, it also runs right behind the baseball stadium for the Angels and The Honda Center which is home of the Anaheim Ducks Hockey team.
The river bed also seemed to be a nice meeting place for birds, particularly gulls.
We saw a LOT of gulls. Frankie was intrigued and I think a little scared by the sheer numbers of them. I also saw hoof prints in the sand of the bottom of the bed and lots of horse droppings but as much as I had hoped to see some horses (Frankie's never seen one and I wanted to see how he'd react since I hope to have one someday) we didn't see any real horses.
The trail is open to cyclists, pedestrians and equestrians because there is a horse stable very close to it as well. However, I noticed the the hard core "cyclists" (the ones in their spandex and aerodynamic gear) seemed to disregard the fact that the trail is open to many forms of transportation and would sneer down in disgust at the pedestrians when they had to go around them. I kind of wished they'd have run into a horse on the trail (who could smoosh them)to see how they reacted to THAT but unfortunately I didn't have that opportunity. "Arrogant jerks" is how I would best describe the worst offenders. There are places where yes, a pedestrian could maybe walk in the dirt alongside the paved path and therefore be totally out of the way of the cyclists, but there are also parts where you really have to kinda be on the path because there is nowhere else to walk. So, I tried to keep to the side since Frankie likes to sniff at the edge of the riverbed and the plants and flowers and such anyway and out of courtesy to the faster moving cyclists. That being said, I didn't HAVE to do that so their rudeness when I did have to be on the path was a bit unjustified. Especially since I always tried to stay to one side and kept Frankie to one side as well. I guess they feel they own it since this is one of the murals on the overpasses.
There were some nice cyclists as well, they were certainly not all bad, but we did have one particular rude man who put a damper on our walk. It was nice to see all the families out on casual family bike rides, other people walking, jogging, or biking and all in perfect harmony for the most part. At one point we saw a man jogging by in the opposite direction and he had two beautiful and happy pitbulls with him. He saw me and Frankie and a big grin spread across his face as he started to wave frantically and point at Frankie and then to his own dogs. I waved back and nodded and smiled and gave him a thumbs up and he gave me a thumbs up back and continued on his way. That was a nice moment towards the end of our walk and it was a nice way to end it. I think we walked a little over 2.5 miles. I would have liked to have walked more but it started to drizzle so I figured we'd get going before the real rain got there. Turned out to be a smart move since it did start to rain HARD shortly thereafter.
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