Kimberly and I rode up to Albany today. We had two destinations in mind.
The first was the Northface Factory Outlet in North Berkeley. Kimberly wanted a nice, breathable raincoat, her last one having been a failure (due to its nonbreathability) while I was vaguely considering a breathable wind breaker (since I get too heated in all of my current jackets while riding). We were largely successful, picking up some nice jackets for relatively good prices.
I wore my jacket through part of the rest of the ride and it seemed to be better than the other stuff I'd been wearing on my bike, but Wednesday night (to Endgame) will be the real test.
Afterward we went to the Albany Bulb, one of the many parks along the East Bay coastline. I'd been out there once before, on one of my early Bay Trail rides, but I mostly ignored the park, because it was all dirt trails.
This time we left out bikes at the park entrance and trudged in. It's a
weird place. As we walked we kept seeing broken apart cement and metal all around. We stayed on the beach trail, and finally we got to a Bayside path that was pretty much all broken up cement.
Further on we found even stranger stuff. Just off the beach there was some little shack made out of cement (maybe), all constructed of curved lines. There was a rooftop area and even a spiral staircase going down. It was all covered with murals and grafitti.
Circling the back of the Bulb we found more and more cast off junk, including numerous bike frames and bike wheels. There was one area where it looked like rubbish of all sorts had been formed together into a dam or something of the sort, where water might once have settled during the rainy season. There was no water there now, but the inside was so flat, that it had to be something of the sort.
I was mystified over this whole post-industrial wasteland/beach. It could have been something out of a post-apocalyptic movie. It looks like the cement and rebar is from when the area used to be a landfill. The City of Albany has started to take it down as a safety hazard (and to make a nicer park), while predictably locals are up in arms.
Though the Bulb was a nice place to visit, mystifying and strange, it could be a much nicer park, and I hope that the city's able to manage that without people going out there to sit on the cement walls in protest.
Anyway, we biked back via a trip over Golden Gate Fields (which was much easier than when I did that same thing a month or two ago) then through a bit of Bay Trail and up Berkeley's Bike Boulevards. A good day of biking and exploration.
Here's some info on the bulb, and in particular that strange little house:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=3&entry_id=298
On the south-west corner is a heart-shaped castle created by "Mad Mark," a mad genius, according to Tomas McCabe, filmmaker and creator of "Bum's Paradise," an award-winning documentary about the Bulb and its community. McCabe took me to the castle, which Mad Mark built by himself during the dark of night from busted up concrete reinforced with dismantled shopping carts. McCabe pointed out the spiral staircase and then outside on the platform, he showed me the concrete club and diamond and the gardener's spade stuck into the ground beside them. "Mad Mark said it's a monument for all the people of California," said McCabe, "He said, 'You have a heart of gold, live up to it.'"
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