Los Angeles is an ideal place to live for "microadventuring." Mountains, deserts, rivers, and the great Pacific are all within reach. Pack a small bag of essentials on a Friday (or midweek as our good friends at Topanga Creek Outpost suggest), and you can get totally lost less than an hour from your front door. It's quite trippy for a city so massive.
Just before the last summer heat wave set in, we packed our bikes with the essentials and headed a bit north to the lovely seaside community of Ventura. A sweet little bike path runs about 13 miles from the coast inland to the charming organic enclave of Ojai—where we enjoyed some healthy eats before heading up into the forest.