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shannon_aSaturday (Bikes & Games). It's time for our (sometimes) semimonthly campaign board game, and it actually happens for the second time since my return from Hawaii. Our plan is to play the fourth box of T.I.M.E Stories and we do, succeeding our on our third run. It's an adventure with a unique twist at the end of the first run, which really pays out the game's time-travel genre (which is what I love most about the game), but the rest of the adventure is pretty pedestrian.
There's a catch to gaming: Mary has suggested that they have it down at their house in San Jose, and I've been saying for months that I'd be happy to journey down there, but that's actually quite a journey because the BART line that was supposed to reach Berryessa last year was never completed (and currently is scheduled no later than the day before our move to Hawaii.) Nonetheless, I'm still happy to go down there, because it lets me do some biking through San Jose on either side of the game.
The Ride South. I do, mind you, have to be out of the house by 10.15 for our 1.00 game. That's to get me out to BART by the 10.28 train, which drops me off at Warm Springs just before 11.30. This is my first trip to the Warm Springs station, though I'd gone by it while it was still under construction (and like its Berryessa brethren, already at least a year late) last time I biked down in San Jose. It's a nice station: very modern, very clean. And, it has the elevators in rational places, which makes hauling my bike around that much easier. The other advantage of Warm Springs is that it's about five miles closer to San Jose than the old Fremont station. Whereas I made a 40+ mile round trip when I journeyed to San Jose a few years ago (including lots of travel out of my way to see parks and greenways), this one ends up coming in somewhere under 30 miles, and that's a lot more doable (though I still end up tired: see being more out of biking shape than I used to be).
Google had told me an hour and four minutes to get to Donald and Mary's house. I didn't believe it, especially not with a plan to collect lunch on the way, and especially since I've got out of biking shape in the last few years. So, I allocated an hour and a half, which turns out to be almost exactly right.
The first three miles heading south are along Warm Springs Boulevard, which is just an ugly, big street of the type that you find in suburbs. But from there I sidestep over to the base of the foothills and ride the entire length of Park Victoria, from south Fremont, through Milpitas, to the edge of San Jose. This is a very pleasant suburban street at first, and even when it becomes busier toward downtown Milpitas, I still enjoy it, because it's very nostalgic.
You see, Milpitas is the first place I lived in San Jose, so I hit Calaveras and I immediately recognize the shopping center where there used to be an Alpha Beta. (It's a Chinese supermarket now.) And looking down Calaveras I have an almost subconscious understanding that the Big Yellow House used to be there — an all-you-can-eat restaurant where they weighed you before and afterward to see what you should be charged. This feeling of dreamingly biking through the past continues through Milpitas, and as I pass the shopping center where we used to sometimes go for Thrifty ice-cream cones (also something else now), I realize that catty-corner from that is the Togo's that my dad took us to growing up, and I detour to that shopping center, and unlike everything else, it's still there 30+ years later! So I get one of my favorites, the 24 (turkey and avocado), which goes in my bag for gaming.
Shortly after that I sidestep over to Capitol Expressway and go RIGHT by my sister's house (and my dad's house when I was growing up), but I don't stop because I'll be seeing them the next day. Then it's up the Peneticia Creek Trail, next to my dad's other residence when I was growing up, and out to Donald's and Mary's.
(And this is where the gaming occurs.)
One thing I note on the way in is how green and clean everything is. There's no trash randomly thrown on the ground, no piles of furniture dumped, no parks with overflowing trashcans, and no homeless parked on every single damned street corner.
There's certainly something to be said for the suburbs.
The Ride North. We complete our T.I.M.E Stories game before four o'clock, and even do a game of the Dresden Files Co-op afterward. But it's still only 4.30 or so when I leave, so I take a longer ride home that I was considering, where I head west for a bit, then head up the Coyote Creek Trail into Fremont.
It turns out the Coyote Creek Trail sucks, at least the part on the east side of the creek. That's because the first two blocks, which include a block of street and then the start of the trail, according to Google Maps, have been blocked off by the city of San Jose. The trail now apparently starts at the border of Milpitas on the other side of the ugly, busy Montegue Expressway (thankfully there are no nasty suburban roads like this up in the East Bay let alone in Hawaii). From there it's a gravel path, up on a rise, with trees off to the left, disguising any potential creek, and businesses off the right, about half of which are internet companies, which of course have fences all the way around. It's not a great ride, because of the gravel, but not horrible.
And then I hit the first underpass, which must have been under East Tasman Drive. This is a great feature of a few different river-side trails in San Jose, which duck you under the constantly busy roads rather than expecting you to cross them. But as I enter the shadow of the underpass, I feel like the road surface is looking weird and then suddenly squelch I'm biking through a few inches of thick, wet mud. I keep going as far as I can, and make it about two-thirds of the way through the underpass, but then the density of the mud finally slows me enough that I can't maintain either my balance or my forward momentum. So I put my foot down (SQUELCH), dismount, and start walking my bike. The mud isn't quite deep enough to go over the top of my shoes, but now that the wheels are going so slow, it's rolling up into my brakes and just coating EVERYTHING.
I spend the next hour or so trying to shake mud off my bike as I ride.
Past Calaveras (and another underpass, where there's fortunately a one-inch or so path through the mud, which I manage to navigate), the trail improves to a paved path. I know I've ridden this before (after coming off the west side of the gravel trail on a previous trip, I think). And then it's roads and I eventually find somewhere to eat and get back to Warm Springs BART.
And I'm tired. I think I've done 30 miles or so. After I get home, I'm not fully coherent again until Sunday.
Sunday (Visits). After spending much of Saturday down in the suburbs of Fremont, San Jose, and Milpitas, on Sunday the suburbs comes to us. My dad and Mary are on their annual visit to California, and so they come up and see us, along with my sister, Melody, and her husband, Jared. We have a good time talking with everyone. We kids exchange Christmas presents, because we didn't manage to even try to get together this year.
Figuring out lunch was a challenge because of Kimberly's ongoing foot problems, but we finally decide on Pasta Bene at the end of our street, and when we do I realize it's a pretty good option, because I know my dad is an Italian fan.
Monday (Bikes & Hikes). Though I did get some nice exercise out in the sun on Saturday, it was in service to gaming, so I'd saved my Memorial Day for a nice hike in the sun, the sort of all-day outing that I haven't really had since before our visit to Hawaii in April.
I often start my plans for a big adventure by scrolling around Google Maps, looking for green spaces that I haven't explored. This time around I was looking at maybe getting into Mount Diablo from the northwest, and I realized something startling:
Pleasant Hill (and southern Concord) has some nice canal trails that form a big "U". To the east, they turn north at the Lime Ridge Open Space. I've ridden out there many a time, and even explored Lime Ridge a bit. I'd always assumed that was the eastern edge of the valley that Pleasant Hill is in, and there were wildlands, ranches, and what now beyond. But looking at the map I saw, no, there was actual city out there, an extension of Concord running up on the higher plateau past the Ridge. Huh.
So I get up early, BART to Pleasant Hill, then ride around the Canal Trail to the Lime Ridge. Though Treat Blvd was the most direct route up to the higher plateau, I instead picked one that I had to bike further to: a little trail up through the park itself. It was less steep, which was the point, so actually bikeable (for me). And so I'm suddenly up in this southeast corner of Concord.
I've got a long path through this area planned. First I go through the Markham Regional Arboretum (which is a beautiful little park, except that the signs make me walk my bike), then I alternatively walk and ride my bike down a long greenway that cuts across several streets (with the narrowness of the trail being what forces me to walk when someone is coming the other direction), then I bike up into the Newhall Community Park (which is kind of ugly, filled with very tall, dry weeds, at least until you get to the lake in the eastern half).
After that I jot out to Clayton Road for lunch at an A&W, which seems like it should be a treat, as I don't know the last time I was at one, but all of their classic American meals are beef. Which I guess is pretty classic. Fortunately they've also got KFC entrees. And then I bike some ugly suburban streets (which are grossly busy like the ones down in the south bay, but which unlike them don't have bike lanes) until I get to the Mitchell Canyon Staging Area, which turns out to be entering Mount Diablo from the north, I've circled around so much!
I've already spent a lot of the day biking around, so I spend less than three hours in the park, but it's quite beautiful, and I really make the most of it. Starting from the 600 foot or so staging area, I hike straight up to Mitchell Rock, at about 1000 feet, and then to the "Twin Peaks" at 1600 feet. That's 1000 feet of ascent in something less than an hour and a half. I get great views all the way up, and really enjoy being out in the wilderness. (I could keep going to another peak, not far on at 2600 feet, but I use the rapidly approaching evening as an excuse to not try.)
I'm less sure about that 1000 feet of descent in a mile and a half or so, but it turns out to be not very steep, with the only problem being a few hundred yards of trail where some landslide has left scree all across the trail. I slip down onto my butt once, but fortunately don't slide on the scree off the edge or anything.
It's past 4 by the time I'm back to my bike. Fortunately the trip back to BART is all either downhill or level. Mind you, the level is more challenging than I'd like, because I'm pretty sore from biking up several hundred feet to get to Mt. Diablo, then hiking up another 1000 feet, and in fact doing more total climbing than that with ups and downs (my Fitbit records more like 2400 feet of ascent all combined). And it turns out that I'm sore for days afterward too.
And so that's another tiny bit of Mt. Diablo that I've explored. But even after three (four?) tripes to Shell Ridge, Diablo Foothills, and Mt. Diablo, I've just explored tiny corners of the park. It's so impressively, enormously big. I wish it were more convenient to get to! (We'll see if I manage maybe one more trip out there while we're in this state.)
There's a catch to gaming: Mary has suggested that they have it down at their house in San Jose, and I've been saying for months that I'd be happy to journey down there, but that's actually quite a journey because the BART line that was supposed to reach Berryessa last year was never completed (and currently is scheduled no later than the day before our move to Hawaii.) Nonetheless, I'm still happy to go down there, because it lets me do some biking through San Jose on either side of the game.
The Ride South. I do, mind you, have to be out of the house by 10.15 for our 1.00 game. That's to get me out to BART by the 10.28 train, which drops me off at Warm Springs just before 11.30. This is my first trip to the Warm Springs station, though I'd gone by it while it was still under construction (and like its Berryessa brethren, already at least a year late) last time I biked down in San Jose. It's a nice station: very modern, very clean. And, it has the elevators in rational places, which makes hauling my bike around that much easier. The other advantage of Warm Springs is that it's about five miles closer to San Jose than the old Fremont station. Whereas I made a 40+ mile round trip when I journeyed to San Jose a few years ago (including lots of travel out of my way to see parks and greenways), this one ends up coming in somewhere under 30 miles, and that's a lot more doable (though I still end up tired: see being more out of biking shape than I used to be).
Google had told me an hour and four minutes to get to Donald and Mary's house. I didn't believe it, especially not with a plan to collect lunch on the way, and especially since I've got out of biking shape in the last few years. So, I allocated an hour and a half, which turns out to be almost exactly right.
The first three miles heading south are along Warm Springs Boulevard, which is just an ugly, big street of the type that you find in suburbs. But from there I sidestep over to the base of the foothills and ride the entire length of Park Victoria, from south Fremont, through Milpitas, to the edge of San Jose. This is a very pleasant suburban street at first, and even when it becomes busier toward downtown Milpitas, I still enjoy it, because it's very nostalgic.
You see, Milpitas is the first place I lived in San Jose, so I hit Calaveras and I immediately recognize the shopping center where there used to be an Alpha Beta. (It's a Chinese supermarket now.) And looking down Calaveras I have an almost subconscious understanding that the Big Yellow House used to be there — an all-you-can-eat restaurant where they weighed you before and afterward to see what you should be charged. This feeling of dreamingly biking through the past continues through Milpitas, and as I pass the shopping center where we used to sometimes go for Thrifty ice-cream cones (also something else now), I realize that catty-corner from that is the Togo's that my dad took us to growing up, and I detour to that shopping center, and unlike everything else, it's still there 30+ years later! So I get one of my favorites, the 24 (turkey and avocado), which goes in my bag for gaming.
Shortly after that I sidestep over to Capitol Expressway and go RIGHT by my sister's house (and my dad's house when I was growing up), but I don't stop because I'll be seeing them the next day. Then it's up the Peneticia Creek Trail, next to my dad's other residence when I was growing up, and out to Donald's and Mary's.
(And this is where the gaming occurs.)
One thing I note on the way in is how green and clean everything is. There's no trash randomly thrown on the ground, no piles of furniture dumped, no parks with overflowing trashcans, and no homeless parked on every single damned street corner.
There's certainly something to be said for the suburbs.
The Ride North. We complete our T.I.M.E Stories game before four o'clock, and even do a game of the Dresden Files Co-op afterward. But it's still only 4.30 or so when I leave, so I take a longer ride home that I was considering, where I head west for a bit, then head up the Coyote Creek Trail into Fremont.
It turns out the Coyote Creek Trail sucks, at least the part on the east side of the creek. That's because the first two blocks, which include a block of street and then the start of the trail, according to Google Maps, have been blocked off by the city of San Jose. The trail now apparently starts at the border of Milpitas on the other side of the ugly, busy Montegue Expressway (thankfully there are no nasty suburban roads like this up in the East Bay let alone in Hawaii). From there it's a gravel path, up on a rise, with trees off to the left, disguising any potential creek, and businesses off the right, about half of which are internet companies, which of course have fences all the way around. It's not a great ride, because of the gravel, but not horrible.
And then I hit the first underpass, which must have been under East Tasman Drive. This is a great feature of a few different river-side trails in San Jose, which duck you under the constantly busy roads rather than expecting you to cross them. But as I enter the shadow of the underpass, I feel like the road surface is looking weird and then suddenly squelch I'm biking through a few inches of thick, wet mud. I keep going as far as I can, and make it about two-thirds of the way through the underpass, but then the density of the mud finally slows me enough that I can't maintain either my balance or my forward momentum. So I put my foot down (SQUELCH), dismount, and start walking my bike. The mud isn't quite deep enough to go over the top of my shoes, but now that the wheels are going so slow, it's rolling up into my brakes and just coating EVERYTHING.
I spend the next hour or so trying to shake mud off my bike as I ride.
Past Calaveras (and another underpass, where there's fortunately a one-inch or so path through the mud, which I manage to navigate), the trail improves to a paved path. I know I've ridden this before (after coming off the west side of the gravel trail on a previous trip, I think). And then it's roads and I eventually find somewhere to eat and get back to Warm Springs BART.
And I'm tired. I think I've done 30 miles or so. After I get home, I'm not fully coherent again until Sunday.
Sunday (Visits). After spending much of Saturday down in the suburbs of Fremont, San Jose, and Milpitas, on Sunday the suburbs comes to us. My dad and Mary are on their annual visit to California, and so they come up and see us, along with my sister, Melody, and her husband, Jared. We have a good time talking with everyone. We kids exchange Christmas presents, because we didn't manage to even try to get together this year.
Figuring out lunch was a challenge because of Kimberly's ongoing foot problems, but we finally decide on Pasta Bene at the end of our street, and when we do I realize it's a pretty good option, because I know my dad is an Italian fan.
Monday (Bikes & Hikes). Though I did get some nice exercise out in the sun on Saturday, it was in service to gaming, so I'd saved my Memorial Day for a nice hike in the sun, the sort of all-day outing that I haven't really had since before our visit to Hawaii in April.
I often start my plans for a big adventure by scrolling around Google Maps, looking for green spaces that I haven't explored. This time around I was looking at maybe getting into Mount Diablo from the northwest, and I realized something startling:
Pleasant Hill (and southern Concord) has some nice canal trails that form a big "U". To the east, they turn north at the Lime Ridge Open Space. I've ridden out there many a time, and even explored Lime Ridge a bit. I'd always assumed that was the eastern edge of the valley that Pleasant Hill is in, and there were wildlands, ranches, and what now beyond. But looking at the map I saw, no, there was actual city out there, an extension of Concord running up on the higher plateau past the Ridge. Huh.
So I get up early, BART to Pleasant Hill, then ride around the Canal Trail to the Lime Ridge. Though Treat Blvd was the most direct route up to the higher plateau, I instead picked one that I had to bike further to: a little trail up through the park itself. It was less steep, which was the point, so actually bikeable (for me). And so I'm suddenly up in this southeast corner of Concord.
I've got a long path through this area planned. First I go through the Markham Regional Arboretum (which is a beautiful little park, except that the signs make me walk my bike), then I alternatively walk and ride my bike down a long greenway that cuts across several streets (with the narrowness of the trail being what forces me to walk when someone is coming the other direction), then I bike up into the Newhall Community Park (which is kind of ugly, filled with very tall, dry weeds, at least until you get to the lake in the eastern half).
After that I jot out to Clayton Road for lunch at an A&W, which seems like it should be a treat, as I don't know the last time I was at one, but all of their classic American meals are beef. Which I guess is pretty classic. Fortunately they've also got KFC entrees. And then I bike some ugly suburban streets (which are grossly busy like the ones down in the south bay, but which unlike them don't have bike lanes) until I get to the Mitchell Canyon Staging Area, which turns out to be entering Mount Diablo from the north, I've circled around so much!
I've already spent a lot of the day biking around, so I spend less than three hours in the park, but it's quite beautiful, and I really make the most of it. Starting from the 600 foot or so staging area, I hike straight up to Mitchell Rock, at about 1000 feet, and then to the "Twin Peaks" at 1600 feet. That's 1000 feet of ascent in something less than an hour and a half. I get great views all the way up, and really enjoy being out in the wilderness. (I could keep going to another peak, not far on at 2600 feet, but I use the rapidly approaching evening as an excuse to not try.)
I'm less sure about that 1000 feet of descent in a mile and a half or so, but it turns out to be not very steep, with the only problem being a few hundred yards of trail where some landslide has left scree all across the trail. I slip down onto my butt once, but fortunately don't slide on the scree off the edge or anything.
It's past 4 by the time I'm back to my bike. Fortunately the trip back to BART is all either downhill or level. Mind you, the level is more challenging than I'd like, because I'm pretty sore from biking up several hundred feet to get to Mt. Diablo, then hiking up another 1000 feet, and in fact doing more total climbing than that with ups and downs (my Fitbit records more like 2400 feet of ascent all combined). And it turns out that I'm sore for days afterward too.
And so that's another tiny bit of Mt. Diablo that I've explored. But even after three (four?) tripes to Shell Ridge, Diablo Foothills, and Mt. Diablo, I've just explored tiny corners of the park. It's so impressively, enormously big. I wish it were more convenient to get to! (We'll see if I manage maybe one more trip out there while we're in this state.)