Los Angeles Times

The Sunny South

So here on a misty bend of Highway 1 we shift gears - slowing long enough to pass the baton - before continuing on, to the bottom half of the state, to a shoreline more familiar and yet, to a remarkable degree, still authentic and untrammeled.

A new day and I was trading the 101 for the 405.Malibu, Santa Monica, Venice.the towns that define L.A.'s proximity to the beach.were right there, full of glamour and mischief, and yet for the purposes of this trip, a bit too trodden. Hermosa Beach was just out-of-the-way enough to provide an alternative, a corner of the South Bay that, as an inlander, a San Gabriel Valleyite, I had never visited. The nicest digs belong to the Beach House, a cozy Cape Cod-ish boutique hotel on the boardwalk. The ocean required some neck craning to view from my "ocean-view" suite, but at least the room had a fireplace, with a Duraflame log at the ready.

Once a favorite of poets and jazzmen, Hermosa these days falls somewhere between Bourbon Street and a Summer Olympics village, a cluster of boozy sports bars to go with elite volleyball on the sand. Barely more than one square mile, the town hugs densely built Hermosa Avenue, home to the Comedy & Magic Club, Jay Leno's long-standing Sunday-night gig. Away from the hubbub of Pier Plaza, I discovered Chef Melba's Bistro, where I polished off a shiitake-glazed pork chop and a warm berry cobbler while Chef Melba herself chatted up customers from the open kitchen.

With practically everyone in the neighborhood riding a bike, I rented a beach cruiser from Hermosa Cyclery the next morning and wheeled up the Strand, the 22-mile path that runs from Palos Verdes to Pacific Palisades. There were surfers and fishermen and even hang gliders to the west, and to the east, wall-to-wall oceanfront pads that ranged from homespun to extraterrestrial. Seeing so much of my city from the outside, the lip of the coast, was liberating, a vantage that made L.A. seem both more distant and more comprehendible. It was not quite real, but as long as I kept pedaling, the illusion was easy to sustain.