Venice beach cycling

We woke up to breakfast being served by Ester in the kitchen, with pastries, and Hungarian plum jam. After breakfast, she offered to drive us to Venice beach where we planned to rent bicycles. On the way sue had a really good sightseeing tour, on places in their lives, and just places of general interest as well. We drove through the Venice canals, which she said she only discovered recently as well. They are 5-6 little canals with nice houses on their bank, and kayaks and boats on the water, it is a really cute place, unfortunately I didn't take any photos from the car though. Then we found a bike rental place and splurged for the premium bikes at an extra dollar an hour, which had gears. They were still a bit rusty and old, but the gears were surprisingly needed on the flat beach as we had quite strong head wind at times. The beach was very pretty, although it was kind of full of weird people. It had a different feel to the san francisco homeless people though, I never actually felt scared by anyone, but regardless they were still quite a bit of the atmosphere of Venice beach. At the same time there were some definitely local people also around, riding skateboards, rollerskates, walking their dogs and kids, and doing various other sports on the beach. There was a funky weightlifting gym, padel courts, volleyball, and quite a lot of bodyweight training stuff. We played around with those, I climbed a rope, probably for the first time since I was a kid. The best was this line of rings though, that we first saw a couple play around with. Basically you had to swing to catch the next rung, and then do a heft pullup to get some momentum, and then swing to catch the upcoming one again. They made it look effortless, but when we first tried it, we both terribly failed. Eventually I managed to do it, but Seamus never managed to get the hang of it.
Here's some videos of our monkey adventures and some other things from the day https://photos.app.goo.gl/SIMc22TJMyPFOsFH3
We also went to the Santa Mónica pier. This used to be a huge attraction, as it was one the the first concrete piers (built to pour sewage into the sea...) but this also meant that they could build various attractions on the pier, like a merry go round, roller coaster, all kinds of food stands. It still is really nice, although it looks much bigger from far away then it actually is. I tried a corn dog for the first time, though it wasn't a super amazing experience to be honest :D
All in all we cycled around for more then 3 hours, though the guys t the rental place was nice, and only charged us for 3!Read more