Orange County cycling or swimming location

I'm not exactly sure where S Flower is but for biking you won't be too far from Santiago Canyon Road, off of which there are a couple other cool roads into other canyons.  For swimming, the 55 freeway SB will essentially end in Balboa in Newport with plenty of beach.

hey leah, there's the Santa Ana River you can ride to the beach, depending on where you are....you should check it out..im not sure where on flower you will be, but west of flower, there are entries into the Santa Ana river via the bike.  I.e if you are on flower and edinger, you can google map.  For a swim, you can take a swim at Corona Del Mar, it's a nice swim, small, if any, waves...hope this helps

x 2 on the Santa Ana River Trail.  I ride that every weekend, and it's great, though it can get fairly busy at times.  It runs uninterrupted from the mouth of the river/wash at Huntington Beach all the way up to Corona, for a one-way distance of approx. 28 miles.  (And then past Corona, it runs again all the way to Riverside, I believe.)

I think there is access to it from pretty much every main street it intersects.  (The trail itself uses underpasses to go beneath the roads so that you don't have to stop.)

Hiya where is the access to Corona Del Mar, I assume its a street off PCH but from there dunno...

corona del mar, best way to get there is take the 55 south all the way to pch, make a left and then make a right a street called margarite i think...you could google it...but you park up on the empty spaces and walk down to the beach..hope that helps..

Edited by mrbigheado 2009-07-16 1:36 PM

Killer, thanks.

Thank you everyone.  I did ride the Santa Ana River Trail from Lincoln down to Weir Canyon, where the trail seems to end.  Round trip that was 15 miles.  Then I went down to Corona Del Mar and swam there.  I had never been there and the water was amazingly flat.  So, no practicing ins and outs because there were no waves, but a perfectly lovely swim nevertheless.  I had a little girl (I'm guessing about ten years old) come up to me to tell me that she had been on swim team for a year and wanted to ask me questions about the sport of swimming.  So, I even got a little bit of ambassador duty out of it. 

The Santa Ana River Trail bears a great deal of similarity to our San Gabriel River Trail, except I think yours is more pleasant because you have lots more trees, at least along the stretch that I did.

It was a terrific afternoon and wish I could have more of them, particularly when I could call it working (because I had the function at night to go to)