Day 14 - end of the road...

We made it to the end of the road!

First of all, I apologise for the delay in updating the blog for the last day. The closing celebrations went on until early morning!

When we woke up at Big Bear Lake there was frost outside. Luckily, by the time we was ready to leave the sun was out and it had warmed up.

Before we set off Alastair gathered both groups in the car park and explained what was going to happen throughout our last day. The second group left first shortly followed by our group.

The first part of the journey was more mountain roads going up then down the mountain.

I just loved the twisties but politely stayed in third position resisting temptation to make good progress and enjoy the road to the full as I didn't want to get lost on the last day. We arrived at a meeting point half way down the mountain where the other group were waiting. We then learnt that one of their members had got a puncture so Aliastair left to go back up the mountain to help out. In the mean time we all stood around taking some photos of the great view of LA from the mountain side and chatted about our previous 13 days of riding. After a while Alastair turns up followed by the Irish chap who had the puncture and of course Trey the scooper. They put some more air in the tyre and we all set off again down the mountain roads to the freeway that we was going to take into Santa Monica Boulevard.

The freeway ride was long (nearly 100 miles) and busy with lots of slow riding and lane swapping. Alastair had quite a job keeping 30 bikes together through the busy LA traffic which was a real experience and would probably worse than London traffic! Most of the drivers around here do not give motorcyclists any consideration, but thankfully we all survived without any issues. We finally got to Santa Monica Boulevard at about 1:30pm parked our bikes in an underground car park and walked the short distance to the end of Route 66 marked by the Will Rogers memorial plaque.

Wow, what an achievement, finally we had done it, reached the end of Route 66 having ridden more than 2500 miles since we left Chicago 14 days ago. Once we had done all the photo shoots we went to an English pub for a drink and a few of us had food as well! Then it was a ride back through the busy traffic to the hotel to unload the bikes before setting of to Eagle Rider where we was to return our bikes. Some of us were sad to depart with the bikes for others it was a relief!