Back to the Bay, Part Two
Nov. 23rd, 2022 09:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aWe landed back up in Berkeley Monday afternoon. My mom volunteered to drive us up since BART had gotten so sketchy through Oakland when we were here last year. It was a bit shocking to see how bad traffic is on the highways again. We never quite came to a stop heading north, but I could see she was going to have stop-and-go on the way home ... and it was only just after 3pm on a Monday!
We are staying pretty much in our old neighborhood, just under half-a-mile from our old house. That's a very different experience from when we visited last year and stayed in Rockridge. Now, every street and intersection and even house is familiar. We're on the route that I took into Endgame and Secret during my last few years in Berkeley (after they got the bike lanes on Shattuck south of Berkeley). Whenever we walk to a store or restaurant, we're following in our old footsteps.
That may in part be why I saw that changes were accumulating as soon we got off the highway. There is a Bank of America that's been totally demolished (by Ashby BART), here are new protected bike lanes (on Adelaine, past that BART station), here's one house that's been painted blue with fishes, here's another that's had its yard dramatically cleared out so that its Buddhist statuary is all visible again.
On Monday night we started out by hustling over to Walgreens and laying in a few supplies, then I followed my same pattern as last year for the day we landed: dinner at The Smokehouse and gaming at Mike B's. It was great seeing Mike B. and Michael A. and Sam in person, and we played some excellent games: first _Cascadia_, a new territory and animal placement game that I'd never played before and was terrific (it's gone onto my to-buy list, as I'm hopeful that Kimberly will enjoy it as well, and also I'm determined to try and reinitiate in-person gaming in either December or January after our return), and then _Railroad Ink Challenge: Lush Green Edition_, which went off much better than it did in San Martin.
Tuesday was my day to visit with Chris & Maire, and Chris had suggested a late afternoon lunch in Lafayette. I looked at my maps and realized that I should be able to hike OVER the hills to the next set of valleys if I got going early enough. So I headed out at 9.30 with the goal of walking from Berkeley to Orinda (and maybe on to Lafayette, but I was pretty sure I'd need/want to take a BART train for that last city-to-city hop).
This is a hike that I literally thought I'd never do again. It requires an EBMUD permit to walk down the watershed on the other side, so it takes some thoughtful planning. And, my five year pass expired in 2019 a few months before I left. I remember taking a last hike on that route from our house to Orinda and back in 2019 and trying my best to be very mindful of an experience I'd never have again. But digging through their site I realized I could get a one-day pass for $3. Ha! Easy!
The hike up to the ridgeline on the Berkeley side was harder than I remembered! It took some real effort to get up to the Upper Fire Trail, where things mostly level out. But I was also determined to do the whole hike in one gulp, without stopping, since I had just less than 4 hours to do a hike that Google Maps swore was 3 hours, while also taking some preferred routes rather than what Google said.
I also saw a bit of passive-aggressive BS when I was first getting up on the trails at Clark Kerr. Some jerk had pinned a note to a tree talking about the "zealots" who had put in the wooden stairs on the hillside above Clark Kerr, how they'd ruined a previously good hiking trail, how the stairs were really hard to remove, and how he'd made the best of a bad situation by painting them as piano steps. The steps had been already painted black & white before I left, but I think there was some additional effort since, and at the time there wasn't the letter highlighting all that is wrong with Berkeley progressivism/individualism. Because (A) I walked up the hillside _ONCE_ before the local neighborhood group put in the steps, and it was a crazed scramble up the hillside, trying not to slide down the entire front face the whole time; and (B) If you're trying to destroy the stairs put up by a large volunteer organization, and used by hundreds of people every day, You Are the A*Hole. It's the exact type of selfish self-interest tied with knowing what's best better than anyone else that ruined the progressive movement in Berkeley.
TL;DR: The stairs are still there. It's still a great/healthy hike. In fact, the trails leading up to the ridgeline were more crowded than I'd ever seen them. Especially the rails right around Clark Kerr, but also the fire trails up above Panoramic Hill.
I enjoyed the work of going up the hill, and then I enjoyed the gradual descent through the stutter-ridges as I hiked down to Orinda. There was unfortunately some type of fire up over Brionnes Reservoir and it was filling the air with particulate matter after I got over the ridgeline. But, I soon realized I had an N-95 mask in my backpack! So I wore that until I hiked down under the smoke.
Terrific to do that again!
And, the joke was on me: it looks like a permit is no longer required for the EBMUD trail that goes from the ridgeline to Orinda. The line of text on the signs that used to say "Permit Required" was cover up by a metal cartouche bolted over it on both sides of the trails. So, that's (likely) terrific, as that's one of the few ways to get from the one side of the hills to the other by foot, and I always thought it was really classist/inconvient to have a nuisance fee associated with. Mind you, I've almost never seen anyone on the trail, including yesterday.
Lunch with Christopher & Maire was nice, at a restaurant just off of Lafayette BART, and then we walked around the area a bit. That's all very familiar too, as I hiked and biked in the area right around Lafayette BART quite a bit over the years.
Our AirBnB gets a fair rating. It's half of an old, subdivided house. A decent amount of room, and nicely equipped rooms. We've sat in the Living Room, eaten in the Kitchen, and slept in the Bedroom.
It has two major flaws.
The first is the heating situation. The realtors who rent out the AirBnB are apparently trying to squeeze every penny out of the place. So they have a thermostat set at 65 degrees and the claim that it's "comfortable" at that temperature is in the info on the apartment. I mean, I guess that should have been my warning, as obviously 65 was not going to be comfortable in Berkeley in late Autumn. You can turn up the thermostat from there, but it's got a timer that drops it back to the "allowed" temperature within 2 hours(!). And it also seems to be timed to drop even lower (somewhere in the 50s) during the day. Which is also not helpful in Berkeley in the Autumn.
The second is noise pollution. We're right on Fulton, which I wouldn't have thought of as a loud street, but it has students wandering up and down yelling like they did at our old house. The biggest problem though is the students living in the other half of the house. First of all, there's just no good sound insulation between the two halves of the house, so we hear them talking and walking and moving furniture from various rooms at various times (and there seem to be several of them jammed into the house, to ensure that someone is always talking/walking/moving). They also seem particularly found of screaming at each other from the front door, which is right up against our front door.
Just slight annoyances, honestly, not enough to spoil an enjoyable stay, but enough to keep this place off of my list for return visits: we can find out the inadequacies of some other AirBnB next year.
Overall, a great start to the start of the second part of our Bay Area trip. From here through Thanksgiving, the main thing on our schedule is eating (with friends).
We are staying pretty much in our old neighborhood, just under half-a-mile from our old house. That's a very different experience from when we visited last year and stayed in Rockridge. Now, every street and intersection and even house is familiar. We're on the route that I took into Endgame and Secret during my last few years in Berkeley (after they got the bike lanes on Shattuck south of Berkeley). Whenever we walk to a store or restaurant, we're following in our old footsteps.
That may in part be why I saw that changes were accumulating as soon we got off the highway. There is a Bank of America that's been totally demolished (by Ashby BART), here are new protected bike lanes (on Adelaine, past that BART station), here's one house that's been painted blue with fishes, here's another that's had its yard dramatically cleared out so that its Buddhist statuary is all visible again.
On Monday night we started out by hustling over to Walgreens and laying in a few supplies, then I followed my same pattern as last year for the day we landed: dinner at The Smokehouse and gaming at Mike B's. It was great seeing Mike B. and Michael A. and Sam in person, and we played some excellent games: first _Cascadia_, a new territory and animal placement game that I'd never played before and was terrific (it's gone onto my to-buy list, as I'm hopeful that Kimberly will enjoy it as well, and also I'm determined to try and reinitiate in-person gaming in either December or January after our return), and then _Railroad Ink Challenge: Lush Green Edition_, which went off much better than it did in San Martin.
Tuesday was my day to visit with Chris & Maire, and Chris had suggested a late afternoon lunch in Lafayette. I looked at my maps and realized that I should be able to hike OVER the hills to the next set of valleys if I got going early enough. So I headed out at 9.30 with the goal of walking from Berkeley to Orinda (and maybe on to Lafayette, but I was pretty sure I'd need/want to take a BART train for that last city-to-city hop).
This is a hike that I literally thought I'd never do again. It requires an EBMUD permit to walk down the watershed on the other side, so it takes some thoughtful planning. And, my five year pass expired in 2019 a few months before I left. I remember taking a last hike on that route from our house to Orinda and back in 2019 and trying my best to be very mindful of an experience I'd never have again. But digging through their site I realized I could get a one-day pass for $3. Ha! Easy!
The hike up to the ridgeline on the Berkeley side was harder than I remembered! It took some real effort to get up to the Upper Fire Trail, where things mostly level out. But I was also determined to do the whole hike in one gulp, without stopping, since I had just less than 4 hours to do a hike that Google Maps swore was 3 hours, while also taking some preferred routes rather than what Google said.
I also saw a bit of passive-aggressive BS when I was first getting up on the trails at Clark Kerr. Some jerk had pinned a note to a tree talking about the "zealots" who had put in the wooden stairs on the hillside above Clark Kerr, how they'd ruined a previously good hiking trail, how the stairs were really hard to remove, and how he'd made the best of a bad situation by painting them as piano steps. The steps had been already painted black & white before I left, but I think there was some additional effort since, and at the time there wasn't the letter highlighting all that is wrong with Berkeley progressivism/individualism. Because (A) I walked up the hillside _ONCE_ before the local neighborhood group put in the steps, and it was a crazed scramble up the hillside, trying not to slide down the entire front face the whole time; and (B) If you're trying to destroy the stairs put up by a large volunteer organization, and used by hundreds of people every day, You Are the A*Hole. It's the exact type of selfish self-interest tied with knowing what's best better than anyone else that ruined the progressive movement in Berkeley.
TL;DR: The stairs are still there. It's still a great/healthy hike. In fact, the trails leading up to the ridgeline were more crowded than I'd ever seen them. Especially the rails right around Clark Kerr, but also the fire trails up above Panoramic Hill.
I enjoyed the work of going up the hill, and then I enjoyed the gradual descent through the stutter-ridges as I hiked down to Orinda. There was unfortunately some type of fire up over Brionnes Reservoir and it was filling the air with particulate matter after I got over the ridgeline. But, I soon realized I had an N-95 mask in my backpack! So I wore that until I hiked down under the smoke.
Terrific to do that again!
And, the joke was on me: it looks like a permit is no longer required for the EBMUD trail that goes from the ridgeline to Orinda. The line of text on the signs that used to say "Permit Required" was cover up by a metal cartouche bolted over it on both sides of the trails. So, that's (likely) terrific, as that's one of the few ways to get from the one side of the hills to the other by foot, and I always thought it was really classist/inconvient to have a nuisance fee associated with. Mind you, I've almost never seen anyone on the trail, including yesterday.
Lunch with Christopher & Maire was nice, at a restaurant just off of Lafayette BART, and then we walked around the area a bit. That's all very familiar too, as I hiked and biked in the area right around Lafayette BART quite a bit over the years.
Our AirBnB gets a fair rating. It's half of an old, subdivided house. A decent amount of room, and nicely equipped rooms. We've sat in the Living Room, eaten in the Kitchen, and slept in the Bedroom.
It has two major flaws.
The first is the heating situation. The realtors who rent out the AirBnB are apparently trying to squeeze every penny out of the place. So they have a thermostat set at 65 degrees and the claim that it's "comfortable" at that temperature is in the info on the apartment. I mean, I guess that should have been my warning, as obviously 65 was not going to be comfortable in Berkeley in late Autumn. You can turn up the thermostat from there, but it's got a timer that drops it back to the "allowed" temperature within 2 hours(!). And it also seems to be timed to drop even lower (somewhere in the 50s) during the day. Which is also not helpful in Berkeley in the Autumn.
The second is noise pollution. We're right on Fulton, which I wouldn't have thought of as a loud street, but it has students wandering up and down yelling like they did at our old house. The biggest problem though is the students living in the other half of the house. First of all, there's just no good sound insulation between the two halves of the house, so we hear them talking and walking and moving furniture from various rooms at various times (and there seem to be several of them jammed into the house, to ensure that someone is always talking/walking/moving). They also seem particularly found of screaming at each other from the front door, which is right up against our front door.
Just slight annoyances, honestly, not enough to spoil an enjoyable stay, but enough to keep this place off of my list for return visits: we can find out the inadequacies of some other AirBnB next year.
Overall, a great start to the start of the second part of our Bay Area trip. From here through Thanksgiving, the main thing on our schedule is eating (with friends).