In Which I Walk Open Streets and Hot Hills
Jun. 3rd, 2018 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aIt's been eight months since Kimberly mostly stopped walking, so it's a bit of a joy that on today, Berkeley's sixth* Sunday Streets, we were able to walk the length of the open streets to North Berkeley and back. She's not better yet, but she's now able to walk extended distances in her boot, and her Doctor has actively encouraged her to do so.
No Sunday Streets has ever been as good as that first one, back in 2012, but they made a good decision pulling it back to the summer, off of the Fall days, when at least one of the Sunday Streets was rained out. And, even though the Sunday Streets are largely commercial now, this time there were enough organizations and activities to keep us entertained.
We saw cute cats from the Berkeley Humane Society, including some siblings of the exact sort Kimberly was looking for a few years ago (but nowadays we are NOT looking to adopt more cats before we have to move them). We learned about Walk Oakland Bike Oakland, a local organization that I'd somehow missed, even though I'm signed up with most of the local biking societies. It looks like they have lots of cool events, and if I can I'm going to join them for a Quarry Walk before gaming next Saturday. We saw kids play the stacking cups games with giant cups and watched many people bowl balls through giant miniature-golf like hazards. And we avoided annoying political people. There were a shocking number of open streets blocks that were entirely empty, and I have to wonder about what looks like a really haphazard organization of Sunday Streets, but overall it was good to see it and great to walk it.
As we have most years since the fascist local restaurants talked the city into outlawing good street food on Sunday Streets, we paused for lunch halfway through at Saul's. As I told Kimberly, it's my yearly latke.
* If you're wondering why there were six Sunday Streets in seven years, it's because the 2017 Sunday Streets was cancelled due to the devastating Napa Fires and the fact that our air was a sludgy mass of carcinogens that year.
It's actually been a good seven days of walking. On Monday, which was Memorial Day, I walked up into the Berkeley Hills, then ended up walking down in North Berkeley, which I haven't done in years. It was fun skipping through North Berkeley parks as I made my way down the hillside. That was also my first day alone since before Hawaii, so that was nice. Then Saturday I went out to Joaquin Miller Park, another of my favorites in the area, but one that's a bit harder to get to, since it's in the hills, south of Montclair and thus requires biking to get to.
One thing that those two hiking days had it common: it was *)(#@$#ing hot. Both days were forecast to be about 75, but it got up to 85 on Monday, then 90 on Saturday. On Monday I just rearranged my route to stay under shade (which is how I ended up in North Berkeley, because the more shaded parts of southern Tilden are toward the North Berkeley side of the park). On Saturday I ended up having an extremely challenging ride up to Joaquin Miller, since biking in hills in the heart is real work, and I made it harder by my taking a "shortcut" that was much hillier. Fortunately, Joaquin Miller is a very shady park, though the climb into it gave me some trouble after the exhausting climb up to it.
Overall, a nice week, and I feel like I'm fully acclimated back to the Bay Area after our 9 days on the islands.
My Fitbit exceed 100k steps for the week thanks to all those days of walking, but I'll surely be back to the 70k that I work at for most weeks as life returns to normalcy in this first week of June.
No Sunday Streets has ever been as good as that first one, back in 2012, but they made a good decision pulling it back to the summer, off of the Fall days, when at least one of the Sunday Streets was rained out. And, even though the Sunday Streets are largely commercial now, this time there were enough organizations and activities to keep us entertained.
We saw cute cats from the Berkeley Humane Society, including some siblings of the exact sort Kimberly was looking for a few years ago (but nowadays we are NOT looking to adopt more cats before we have to move them). We learned about Walk Oakland Bike Oakland, a local organization that I'd somehow missed, even though I'm signed up with most of the local biking societies. It looks like they have lots of cool events, and if I can I'm going to join them for a Quarry Walk before gaming next Saturday. We saw kids play the stacking cups games with giant cups and watched many people bowl balls through giant miniature-golf like hazards. And we avoided annoying political people. There were a shocking number of open streets blocks that were entirely empty, and I have to wonder about what looks like a really haphazard organization of Sunday Streets, but overall it was good to see it and great to walk it.
As we have most years since the fascist local restaurants talked the city into outlawing good street food on Sunday Streets, we paused for lunch halfway through at Saul's. As I told Kimberly, it's my yearly latke.
* If you're wondering why there were six Sunday Streets in seven years, it's because the 2017 Sunday Streets was cancelled due to the devastating Napa Fires and the fact that our air was a sludgy mass of carcinogens that year.
It's actually been a good seven days of walking. On Monday, which was Memorial Day, I walked up into the Berkeley Hills, then ended up walking down in North Berkeley, which I haven't done in years. It was fun skipping through North Berkeley parks as I made my way down the hillside. That was also my first day alone since before Hawaii, so that was nice. Then Saturday I went out to Joaquin Miller Park, another of my favorites in the area, but one that's a bit harder to get to, since it's in the hills, south of Montclair and thus requires biking to get to.
One thing that those two hiking days had it common: it was *)(#@$#ing hot. Both days were forecast to be about 75, but it got up to 85 on Monday, then 90 on Saturday. On Monday I just rearranged my route to stay under shade (which is how I ended up in North Berkeley, because the more shaded parts of southern Tilden are toward the North Berkeley side of the park). On Saturday I ended up having an extremely challenging ride up to Joaquin Miller, since biking in hills in the heart is real work, and I made it harder by my taking a "shortcut" that was much hillier. Fortunately, Joaquin Miller is a very shady park, though the climb into it gave me some trouble after the exhausting climb up to it.
Overall, a nice week, and I feel like I'm fully acclimated back to the Bay Area after our 9 days on the islands.
My Fitbit exceed 100k steps for the week thanks to all those days of walking, but I'll surely be back to the 70k that I work at for most weeks as life returns to normalcy in this first week of June.