No gaming today, as we're still trying to get back into the swing of two Saturday games. Thus I decided to have lunch out, bike down to Oakland to check out the Main Library now that I have a card for that library system, then bike back.
Berkeley Bigness. Lunch was at good 'ole Oscar's in downtown Berkeley. They had a huge-screen TV, which I'd never seen before, and it was running, no surprise, football coverage. However, I was able to hide in the relatively-quiet other side of the place and eat and read in pleasant solitude. The Big Game was just getting started as I left. Thank goodness.
As I started heading south toward Oakland, I passed through a parking area that the city(?) always creates (from streets) during the football games. I was amazed that it was only half full, now 10 or so minutes after the Big Game was started. But then I'd also been impressed by the huge numbers of people that I saw streaming forth from BART on my way out to lunch. I guess we've got Bay Area people well trained to use public transit. Or at least the sports fans, as it's pretty convenient to get to most of the Bay Area sports events that way.
Riding the Bay. From Berkeley, I swung down into Emeryville, and after carefully biking through that town (as recent reports suggest that Emeryville police have taken a predatory stance toward bicyclists) headed into Oakland.
I'd decided that I wanted to ride the Bay Trail down Mandela Parkway. Now, that area of town makes me a little nervous because there's westish Oakland to the east of it and WEST Oakland to the west of it. However, most of Mandela is commercial/industrial, and the Bay Trail strip down the middle of the street is absolutely beautiful. I enjoyed it, as I have before, though I was really noticing the wind by this point, perhaps due to my proximity to the Bay.
From there I turned east on 3rd Street and rode into Uptown just north of the waterfront, skirting Jack London Square, then heading back north at Broadway. Rain had been threatening all day, with just a few drops here and there, but it started showering a fair amount just as I pulled into the Oakland Main Library, which is on 14th Street, right next to Lake Merritt.
The Library. I was relatively unimpressed by the Oakland Main Library. Mostly, it was smaller than I expected. I'm pretty sure it has less public-accessible area than the Berkeley Main Library. Surely the couple of book sections I looked at (comics, science-fiction) weren't quite as well stocked (though not bad either). Given that Berkeley has about a quarter the population of Oakland, I was expecting something bigger, but I suspect this is actually a reflection on what a great Main Library Berkeley has for its size (and I now smile at the fact that Wikipedia says the Oakland Main Library is one of the biggest in the Bay Area; I guess it's all about perspective).
The actual building is a big, unattractive block, built in the early 1950s. The main rooms are all huge because of high ceilings and few walls, but don't have a lot of character. All of the fiction is stuck into small cramped areas that I could truly call stacks: 10 foot ceilings, ceiling to floor metal bookshelves. You know, like the cool stacks at Cal.
On the second floor, which is mostly administrative, there was a marvelous set of black and white photos depicting Oakland in the late 1800s and early 1900s. I spent quite a while browsing through them all, seeing lots of familiar places looking totally unfamiliar. My favorite photo was the one showing a western arm of Lake Merritt that no longer exists.
Or maybe my favorite was a photo of the 1887 graduating class at Mills (about a dozen women). A somewhat cryptic caption read something like, "It would be difficult (and perhaps dangerous) to identify these women today." I finally figured out that some or all of the photos on exhibit had been put up in the early 1950s, possibly shortly after the library's construction. Thus the caption was noting that those women (or at least the survivors) were then in their 80s, and unlikely to look like the nubile young beauties seen in the photo.
Final Biking. I took an unusual route home too, since I was enjoying biking around despite the cold and wind. First I went around Lake Merritt the long way and stopped at the Lakeview library, to the North of the Lake. It's a very small library, probably about the same square footage as our house, but unlike the Main library it had a sense of beauty to it. I'd guessed it was built much earlier than the Main Library, but it turns out it went up in 1949 compared to the Main Library's 1951. Go figure.
From there I went up Grand, past Piedmont, over the hill, then back down to Broadway and over to College. I was pleased to discover that I can manage the whole hill from the Lake to Piedmont without getting worn out, though I still opted to walk the couple of blocks past Piedmont.
On College, I stopped at the Rockridge Library to pick up a book that was on hold for me (actually, my ridiculous fourth library visited while I was out, as I did the same at the Berkeley Main Library on my way in), then it was back home.
It was around 3.30pm by the time I pulled into Berkeley, and Ashby was just packed. I correctly guessed that it was people leaving the Big Game. I incorrectly guessed that the game was over. In actuality, Stanfurd had given Cal an even worse drubbing than usual, so people were getting out to avoid the crowd. (It looks like Cal got a few pity points in the last quarter, presumably when Stanfurd's third string got put in.)
So that's what I did while piles of people sat in a cold, occasionally wet stadium here in Berkeley. I didn't hear any cannons as a result, but as it turns out, I really wouldn't have anyway.
Total ride was a bit more than 16 miles. I was out for close to three hours, but that included quite a bit of time wandering Oakland Main and a little bit at other stops.
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