Why would people NOT want to bicycle all the way around San Diego Bay? Here’s my guess.
- Because they don’t like biking anywhere.
- Because they don’t realize how awesome the sights are.
- Because they think it would be too hard.
- Because they don’t know the route.
Although I can understand the first excuse, until this morning, the fourth was mine. From the ferry landing, I had ridden down the Silver Strand several years ago. But then I’d turned back because the dedicated bike path stopped in the middle of the South Bay, and the thought of threading my way back to downtown San Diego through the surface streets of eastern Imperial Beach, Chula Vista, and National City felt too daunting.
That trip through Coronado and the Strand did make it clear to me how splendid the (western) bayside scenery is, and I’d heard last year about the completion of the bike trail in that section of the South Bay’s eastern quadrant where I had previously been stymied. I still had a few doubts about whether I was fit enough to ride for 26 miles and enjoy it. (I don’t bike routinely.)
The first riders started off just after 7 .m.
We got two of the five lanes, crossing the bridge.
But when I heard about this year’s “Bike the Bay” event, I couldn’t resist. This morning I was one of the 2700 riders who pedalled south from Embarcadero Marina Park South starting just after 7 a.m. A little more than two and a quarter hours later, I was back with a solid answer to to the fitness question: it felt easy. No part of me was sore! Even the toughest part — climbing the incline to the highest part of the Coronado Bridge — seemed a breeze, fueled as I was by adrenaline and aided by my bike’s highest gears.
Sponsored by the San Diego County Bicycle Coalition (which works to improve biking facilities throughout the county), the ride was not competitive. It felt congenial; never scary. On the bridge, we got two of the five lanes, and the staging of the rider departures made the crowd thin enough that my pre-race nightmare of getting jostled over the side never came anywhere close to materializing.
The rest of the ride offered a salad of surfaces and ways of interacting with other traffic. The SANDAG website says that about 13 miles of the so-called “Bayshore Bikeway” are dedicated bike paths. After this morning, I can testify that some of those are magni
ficent. One stretch north of E Street in Chula Vista adjoins the freeway but feels protected from it and offers terrific views of the Highway 54 on-ramps and the Sweetwater River (spanned by a wonderful bridge named after longtme biking enthusiast Gordy Shields). On the recently completed path along the bay’s southern shore, you feel you’re gliding over the wetlands. I gawked with delight at the Western Salt Works’ otherworldly evaporational ponds.
The worst ride came just north of the entrance to Naval Station San Diego. Pocked and buckling, the roadway there also is crossed by rail track that caught the wheel of at least one rider this morning (and brought her crashing down). But that stretch passes NASSCO (San Diego biggest ship builder), and the views (there and elsewhere along the working waterfront) make up for their unloveliness by being so interesting. 
This is a ride worth doing more than once, I concluded. If one can do without the bridge-crossing part of the program, it’s accessible at any time. The next time I attempt it, I’ll probably reverse my trip of this morning: park at the Embarcardero downtown, bicycle due south, and return north up the Strand and through Coronado to the ferry landing. Bikes are welcome (for free) on the ferries that depart from there back to the Embarcadero hourly on the half hour. Cost to the rider is $3.75. Detailed directions to the route are worth printing out.
