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One-time donations

Your one-time donations will help us at San Diegans for Gun Violence Prevention fund the programs of community groups on the front lines of ending gun violence of all kinds. They will help us register for the dozens of in-person tabling events we attend each year and print the brochures we hand out at them. We’ll use your donations for promotional materials, t-shirts, our mailing list software, and for boring stuff like insurance and our P.O. box. SD4GVP is completely volunteer-driven, so your donations go straight to our mission.

What’s a good amount for a one-time donation?

We’re fortunate to receive frequent donations of $25, $50 and $100. One gentleman – a responsible, clear-thinking gun owner – symbolically donated $650, the retail price of a Beretta Px4 Storm semi-automatic pistol.

Donate an amount that you’re comfortable with. Use the “Other Amount” box and surprise me. We’ll put it all to good use.

Recurring donations

The button below makes it even easier for you to set up recurring donations. In addition to everything I’ve just mentioned, your recurring donations take the edge off operations by helping us budget and plan our expenditures.

What’s a good amount for a recurring donation?

We have recurring donors who give us anywhere from $10 to $50 a month. (“Recurring donations are the heartbeat of every non-profit organization I know of,” one of our most generous monthly donors told me.) They have helped us weather the three-year pause in in-person meetings and the general fall-off in engagement that the pandemic has brought about.

We’re always grateful for your donations. They show us – and, by extension, they show the electeds, officials and people directly affected by gun violence – that this work is important to you.

There is much more that I can’t take the time to write now, especially about the people along the way:

·       The Mexican farmworker I met on the train, with a palsy that caused the fingers of one hand to curl, who gave me a $20 bill just because I chatted with him and helped him open his food packaging, then asked me to pay the twenty bucks forward.

·       The cyclist at Refugio with a story about lurking near the disastrous landslides blocking Highway 1 in Big Sur, then furtively walking his bike around them after the road workers went home at night.

·       The young FedEx driver in Del Mar who tried to explain “runner’s high” to me in terms I could grasp.

·       The woman in SLO who, after raising five children, realized that she didn’t know who she was anymore and had spent the last six years cycling and camping throughout the West.

·       The two Mexican families in the restaurant in Santa Maria who spoke fine Spanish to the waitress and a completely unintelligible, indigenous language to each other.

·       The gracious but concerned relative who offered me a big bag of money if I “didn’t take the damned trip in the first place.”

Did you notice how rarely I smiled in my selfies? That’s for two reasons: It was usually miserably hard work to ride all day, so smiling wasn’t top of mind for me. Similarly, thinking about the superhuman effort that goes into preventing gun violence doesn’t always leave me in a good mood.

But was it a good trip?

On a good trip, you meet a lot of new people who are different from you. You do cool things with them and get exposed to novel ideas. This ride wasn’t like that, but it was good in other ways.

While I was off the bike, I saw and reconnected with people from as far back as high school and college, all the way up to recent co-workers in technology. I enjoyed the warm hospitality of friends and relatives I hadn’t seen since the onset of the pandemic. We had some laughs and then, like Huck Finn getting back onto the river, I got back onto The Road.

While I was on the bike, it was mostly physical work: pedaling up endless grades, navigating uneven pavement, recovering from wrong turns, negotiating peace between seat and butt, and shifting gears – always, always, always shifting. Then there’s the mental work: having to stop and double-/triple-/quadruple-check the map, giving parked cars wide berth, keeping an eye out for public restrooms, telling myself I was in over my head, telling myself I wasn’t in over my head, watching for unexpected door openings, wondering about calorie-burn, and planning what to eat next and where to get it. Worst of all, do you like getting a lousy song stuck in your head? Imagine that on the forever-stretch of city road across Torrance, Carson and Long Beach.

Remember the one about the guy who keeps hitting himself in the head with a hammer because it feels so good when he stops? A long ride is in that same category. The only thing that could be worse would be to stay home and not go at all.

When I woke up, my legs were in full revolt.

“What did we tell you about riding more than 40 miles a day with all that weight?” they bawled. “We’re taking today off.”

“Now, now. You’ve pumped between here and San Diego plenty of times,” I told them. “This shouldn’t be too hard.”

“Yeah,” they answered, “but not after eleven days of riding. Besides, the streets we’ll ride near San Diego Harbor suck, and you’ve never ridden from the Bayshore Bikeway to San Ysidro and the border. And, you’ll ride more than 50 miles today. Don’t expect a cake walk.”

“All right. But I haven’t had to get off and push the bike yet, and I don’t feel like starting today.”

Still, they clamored for less weight and more breaks. The first demand was easy to satisfy: I removed the tent and sleeping bag from the bike and left them in Oceanside. Maybe then I wouldn’t need to concede on the second demand.

But I did need to.

Obliged by my aching body to sit down in a park only four miles into the ride, I realized that there was no shame in stopping more frequently – much more frequently – than usual. In fact, it would be the only way I could finish the ride without my legs and seat going on strike. That meant taking breaks at Carlsbad, Encinitas and Del Mar.

The Del Mar break was important because I needed to stoke the boiler for the ride up Torrey Pines Hill, a 1.5-mile climb from zero to 400 feet above sea level. I managed the hill without needing to stop; that must have been the result of either good preparation or my legs demanding to just get things over with.

From Torrey Pines, the map – oh, to hell with the map – showed me a coastline route around La Jolla, Pacific Beach and Mission Beach, then through Point Loma, past the airport, onto the Coronado Ferry, to the Silver Strand and Border Field State Park. Yes, it would have reduced the time I spent on busy streets, but at the cost of continually consulting the map and racking up miles needlessly.

Instead, I took the most welcome bike route in the world that day: a long downhill through UCSD, Gilman Drive and the Rose Canyon Bikeway onto Mission Bay Drive, where I took a ten-minute nap on a picnic bench. Then, I dived into the urban jungle of Pacific Highway past Old Town, Midway District and Middletown, where there’s no shoulder, the road surface hasn’t been improved since Junípero Serra left and the motorists love it that way.

At the Embarcadero I stopped for lunch. A mid-afternoon sun had come out, and the young couple next to me bought hulking tubs of chocolate soft-serve for their kids and themselves. Each of them spent the next half-hour in a losing battle against the elements, with ice cream covering their faces, hands and clothes. The wind mocked the handfuls of flimsy paper napkins they tried to use, blowing them anywhere it pleased and frustrating the parents’ attempts to bring order to snacktime. The mother snarled and the father chuckled. It struck me as very different from the way I was traveling.

More road-surface abuse awaited me south of Downtown, where generations of heavy trucks have battered the streets near the waterfront. I bumped along Harbor Drive, finally arriving at the turn for the Bayshore Bikeway through National City and Chula Vista. I wasn’t paying much attention to my legs or seat anymore as I pedaled across Nestor and San Ysidro, looping past the Las Americas Outlets and finally arriving – almost anticlimactically – at the western pedestrian passage at 5:45 p.m. I couldn’t see a Mexican flag anywhere, but I could see the Friendship Arch over Avenida Revolución on the other side of the border.

Riding over a bridge, I saw the border approach for cars, crowding up with Friday rush-hour traffic.

Serendipitously, my son texted me just then. “I have the truck. Where are you? Do you need me to pick you up somewhere?” That sounded like a splendid idea, far better than riding another 20-odd miles back into town to my house. I rode over to the trolley stop – footsteps from the McDonalds where a gunman killed 21 people in 1984 – and caught a train for downtown San Diego. Young families in Padres jerseys thronged in the car on the way to a baseball game.

As I struggled to keep my bike under control and out of people’s way, it occurred to me to check my odometer.

“Not bad – 440 miles,” I thought. “If I can do that, I can do anything.”

Maybe even prevent gun violence in America.

The morning gray had resumed. I rose, went into the kitchen and made oatmeal.

“You’re going to need protein to go with those carbs,” said my cousin. “I’ll make something for you.”

Five minutes later, he served it. “Hey, look!” I exclaimed to his wife. “My cousin made me a three-egg burrito. I can eat some now and some later.”

“See how we take care of you?” she said.

That they do.

I continued down the coast. If Manhattan Beach was not flat, Newport Beach and Laguna Beach were really not flat. It was a tough ride all morning, as my legs continued announcing their displeasure and my gut continued pushing calories to them. I had done parts of this ride before, but never the entire stretch. Although I passed nice scenery, I wasn’t in much of a mood to enjoy it. There was too much work to do and too many miles for me to cover. I stopped for lunch in Dana Point.

While I was eating, my friend from Santa Barbara texted: “How goes it? Where are you today?”

“Dyin’ in Dana Point,” I replied. “Trying to reach Oceanside today, but tough going because of the hills. I may join the Marine Corps just so I can catch a nap in Camp Pendleton.”

South of Dana Point, the Coast Highway Protected Trail runs alongside El Camino Real. A young woman on a coaster bike pulled out from the beach onto the trail ahead of me. Dedicating her left hand to the bike and her right hand to her mobile phone, she conversed with a friend for at least a mile, effortlessly pedaling while I huffed and puffed along in the afternoon gray. Youth is indeed wasted on the young.

When I reached San Clemente, the map did everything it could to keep me off of El Camino Real, indicating a zigzag route that probably involved ups and downs. My legs were having none of it.

“Get us the hell to Oceanside!” they demanded.

Trading off the ups and downs for a single, long climb, I stuck to El Camino Real and stopped to rest on a bench at the top of the hill.

The route south from San Clemente is a patchwork of residential streets, bikeways, ancient highways, a long, thin campground in a state beach, and something that looks a lot like a jet runway, all running alongside the I-5. At one point, you enjoy an almost pastoral view of the decommissioned San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

This stretch is a sort of carve-out from Marine Base Camp Pendleton. For me, it heralded the end of riding through L.A. sprawl and the return to landscape that is happily undeveloped (albeit for military reasons and with superhighway traffic).

The first order of business upon reaching the state park was to locate a wooden picnic bench – easy, now that the holiday crowd had departed – and lie down for a bit. To pacify my legs, I managed to doze off for a few minutes, then told them relief was only a few miles away.

But.

I owed it to my legs, myself and those who love me to at least try to obtain a pass to ride the approved, off-interstate route through Camp Pendleton. I pedaled an unwelcome hill to the gate at Las Pulgas Road, where I spoke with one of three military policemen wearing body armor and toting machine guns.

MP: Sir?

Me (panting from the climb): I’d like to ride through the base, please.

MP: Do you have a base pass?

Me: No. I registered and was in the system a few years ago, the last time I rode through.

MP: Oh. That system is obsolete.

Me: So, how do we do this?

MP: You come back Monday, sir, and apply for a pass in that building. (Indicating Building 41501, next to the gate.)

Me: Monday?! Today’s only Thursday!

MP: That’s how we do this. (Pausing.) Sir.

Me: Well, then I guess I’m taking the I-5, right?

MP: That’s up to you. (Pausing.) Sir.

I made a U-turn around the median, coasted back down Las Pulgas and up the on-ramp to the I-5.

Do you ever drive the freeway with your windows rolled down? Of course not. Why not? Because it’s too bloody loud. Turns out it’s even louder when you’re riding a bicycle alongside the freeway. The roar of trucks, SUVs and ordinary sedans rushing past me was deafening and rather daunting. Even the surface of the shoulder – despite the small bits of litter all over it – was less troublesome that the menacing din of passing vehicles on the concrete highway. The noise level prevented the idea of taking a selfie from even crossing my mind; too bad, because it would have been one of the more riveting photos in this travelogue.

Fortunately, the shoulder was wide, and bright-green signs announced “Cyclists on Shoulder” as a warning to motorists – at least, to those motorists attentive enough to notice them. Also fortunately, the traffic generated a mild tailwind, or counteracted any headwind, enough to appease my legs and seat. Most fortunate of all, the nine-mile stretch is interrupted at mile two by a rest stop, where I paused to use the restroom, have a snack, rethink my life and hope the damage to my hearing would not be permanent.

“All right, legs,” I said. “One final push. Then we rest.”

“What about me?” nagged my seat.

“Yes,” I answered, “we all get to rest soon.”

So, nothing untoward happened, or even came close to happening, as I rode I-5. A long, loud way later, I exited at Harbor Drive in Oceanside and rode down Pacific Avenue, where the most perilous thing I did all day was to stand in the middle of the street and take a selfie.

I stayed at my parents’ place and inhaled a bowl of tortellini while enjoying the company of another high school chum. He knew me well enough to know that riding a bicycle on the I-5 was right in character for me, so I didn’t have to explain much.