shannon_a

Life continues to be a fast flurry of activity.

Cats. We've thankfully not been to the vet for a week now. It took Callisto about two more days to be fully back to her old self, but now you couldn't even tell she ate a lizard (or whatever). She's wildly meowing for food, clumsily leaping into laps, and happily head butting hands. Lucy also hasn't repeated her really weird behavior, but it was always sporadic.

On the downside, I've been constantly administering meds to both the cats. For a while, each day has been antibiotics for Lucy in the morning, and antibiotics and prednisone for Lucy in the evening plus prednisone for Callisto. This has gotten very old. Callisto, at least, continues to be mostly fooled by the pill in the food trick, but Lucy got wise to that, so I've been pill-shooting her for about a week. She has a spectacular ability to spit the pill out even when it's way back in her throat. She and I are also totally over the liquid prednisone she was prescribed. For a while I could hide that in her food too, but these cats are wily, so now it's liquid syringe, and then she goes and hides. Bleh.

At least, Lucy's pilling is done of this morning, and Callisto is back to every-other-day, also as of today. Finally, Lucy is going back to the vet on Monday for a recheck, and we'll need to see if the prednisone is doing any good and if so we *have* to get it as compounded treats, like we had for Cobweb. Because the daily liquid application and the unhappy cat is killing me.

Doors. Because Kimberly has been recovering from her surgery, we haven't been over to my dad and Mary's house for Sunday gaming for the last two weeks, so those Sundays, my dad came over to help me with the spray painting of the doors for Kimberly's closet (the remaining two doors that is, we got the first two, which Kimberly and I had painstakingly painted up the first time he was over). We thought we had them done after last Sunday, but when I reviewed them in the light of day when they were dry, one not only still had streaks, and still had dust.

The dust has been a constant problem with these doors and the *)(@#$*)(#@ Rustoleum 2x paint we're using. My dad was able to diagnose it as something wrong with the nozzles, and so sometimes they spray dust instead of paint. Which requires much brushing off of the doors and sometimes sanding and starting over. So we thought all of our spraying was clean last time, but I found some of the darker dust on one of the doors.

My dad is *great* when he's working with me: he does some of the work and shows me how to do it and then has me do some of the work. So after working on those two Sundays, I feel confident about using his technique to put another coat on the remaining door. I just haven't had *time* to do so since Tuesday when I noticed the problem.

Why not? Well Wednesday was gaming (New Frontiers now on BGA!), and then the other two days had other commitments.

Oahu. Thursday was take-Kimberly-to-Oahu day. Or take her to the airport at least. So I got up early, took her to the airport, came home, worked a little bit, ate lunch, napped, worked a little bit, and then went and picked her up from the airport. I'm sure my day felt very short and hers felt very long.

She was over on Oahu for the follow-up with her doctor on the surgery. All good so far, but the ultimate test will be when she's able to try some walking, and that probably won't really be until after her follow-up appointment, in six weeks.

Water Heaters. Friday I got to help my dad at his house, which we hadn't done since before they had their trip out to California. (I too remember being places other than these islands!) It was a pretty small task, getting a water heater into place and then connecting it and wrapping it. But the getting it into place was tricky because it was about a hundred pounds and we had to get it into a not-quite-big-enough pan without crushing our fingers. Fortunately, he had two pallets and we had our ingenuity. So, we rolled it up on a pallet, and then up on the stand, and then up on a stacked pair of pallets and then from there could maneuver it down into the pan on the stand. Whew. My dad did the connecting, and then we were able to get the wrapping done.

Taxes. Meanwhile, the idiot-tax-demands continue, as Hawaii continues to try and hold us up for a large sum of money that's not theirs because we paid it to California. Last week I got two letters the same day, one from the hospital asking for the second time for a bill that's been paid and one from the Hawaii Tax idiots, saying that the third(!) amended return that I sent them wasn't valid because we hadn't signed the form. Which we had. I told Kimberly that the message for the day was that Hawaiian organizations were really crappy at bureaucracy.

As far as I could tell, the problem was that we'd done what our accountants advised us to, which was sign the new N-11 form that we'd sent in, but Hawaii was upset that the original N-15 which the N-11 replaced, was unsigned. It was a copy of the original form, not an official ammended form! Whatever. Our accountants said: just do what they want. So we gave them some electronic signatures. (This is the whole, replace not-full-year-residents with full-year-residents change that was required because their tax computers couldn't deal with us not being full-year residents last year, since we were only off by a third of a day or so.)

We'll see if that works, but meanwhile yesterday we received the newest missive from Hawaii and it was a threat: they let us know that they were going to start confiscating our federal refunds if we didn't send them their money. That's not theirs. Ugh. )(*@#ing Hawaii.

Biking. But in the beautiful Hawaii category: I had a nice bike ride up at the Kauai Path today and got some nice writing done.

Writing. I again chose some smaller topics this month, to again try to get my work (and my stress) back on track. It's working better this month than it did last month, with our constant trips to Oahu. I finished up the last big chunk of my intended history writing today out at the beach (with editing still needed). That means that if I want I can spend the rest of the month on the elf book for Chaosium (along with my tech writing, of course), and maybe get that close to done. I've already talked with the folks at Chaosium and got a month delay and the ability to go over in word count if I want. So, that's all looking pretty good. (I just have to resist the urge to write a second history for the month, as there's another that would go very well with the first. But If I finish the Elf Pack, I'll again have more time for everything else again.)

Truth to tell, the flight wasn't mine. I drove my dad and Mary out to the airport three weeks ago, and then picked them up on Monday. They were out in San Jose seeing my sister and her husband and their new granddaughter.

That would be the first time I've driven anyone to airport (and back). It was delightful to give a little something back after decades of being driven to the airport myself.

It was also the first time that Kimberly and I have been without family on the island since we moved here, and in fact since our first trip on 2001. Which was weird to realize.

But all is returned to normal now, and life is back on its new normal track, with gaming over at their house of course planned for Sunday.

There were three Saturdays while they were away, and as Saturday is usually my restful day away, I was off to three different locales.

(I say restful, but I usually go out somewhere, get some exercise, and do some writing too.)

First Saturday was out at Mahaulepu, my go-to spot for a thoughtless Saturday trip. It's the Tilden of Hawaii for me. (I used to be able to walk straight up into the hills from our house in Berkeley, and on my easy/thoughtless trips there, I'd walk north until I hit Tilden and the drop down to get to the bus stop. It was a 10+ mile one-way trip with a ride back. And no thinking or planning required.)

I usually walk to Mahaulepu from Poipu, Shipwreck Beach, or somewhere in-between, depending on how early or late my morning is going.

Anyway, so I did my typical walk, and then ate lunch out at Mahaulepu and wrote and edited for a while.

Unfortunately, I had a very unwelcome interruption while out there. It turns out that some capitalist scumbags called Kauai ATV have decided that Mahaulepu is a great place for Disneyland style tours, so while I was there, two guides with 20-30 unruly tourists came shouting into the usually (somewhat) quiet area, stopped right in the area I was lunching, and then the main guide watched as his bad-tourists raced off to taunt the nearby tortoises. A second "guide" literally huddled under the bridge while this was happening. When the tourists returned, one even sat down at the table across from me, not giving me my six feet (and not wearing a mask).

Now don't get me wrong. There are tourists on the island. Since we unwisely lifted our COVID quarantines, there have been lots of tourists on the island. I've seen many of them at Mahaulepu. I've often given them directions to the tortoises and the beach. I often tell them that no I don't have wifi, and yes it is a beautiful office. I've exchanged pleasantries with the totally appropriate, respectful, and well-run horseback tours out of the local ranch, both with the tour guides and the tourists.

But there's a big difference between a family of 2-8, a quiet and respectful tour of 10-15 riders, and a large and unruly group of 20-30 who weren't under any sort of control. That tour group was entirely inappropriate for the area.

Afterward I did some bitching on a Kauai Rants FB group, and everyone there was *shocked* to hear about the organized tours at Mahaulepu. Someone pointed me to a Mahaulepu Preservation society, and so I noted the concern to them, and they were *shocked*. They pointed me to the people who run the cave at Mahaulepu and plant all the native plants and take care of the tortoises, and they knew who the tourist group was, and clearly weren't thrilled with them already, and so asked me to file a complaint with Grove Farm who owns the area. So I complained to Grove Farm, and they said they would send an admonition on to Kauai ATV. It won't stop the Disneyland tours, I'm sure, but maybe they'll be better controlled in the future or at least terrorize the tortoises less and trample less native vegetation. Oh, and I should note Grove Farm also lied to me, or at least heavily misrepresented the truth, by saying how thrilled the cave people were about these tours because they were getting some smidgeon of money from it, and overprivileged tourists could make themselves feel better by planting a tree. Having talked to the cave people, I knew this was a lie.

(And I certainly would not have gone to all this trouble of contacting people on my own, but at every stage, I kept hearing "So-and-so will want to know" or "You can help us by telling this to so-and-so." So I did.)

Oh, and if it weren't clear, the tourists weren't in ATVs. That's the other part of the tour. Then they let them all roam free in a mob before hopping into different ATVs.

Sadly, I haven't been back to Mahaulepu since I saw it overrun that Saturday. But I've been adjusting my expectations about our island for three months now. I'm never, ever going to see Mahaulepu so quiet and pleasant as I did when we were in the first year of the pandemic, and our government pretended it cared more about us than the tourists. And now I'm apparently not going to see it without it Disneyland tours going by at top volume and overrunning the picnic area for a while. So we'll see how that goes when I return tomorrow.

Second Saturday was a trip to Kekaha. This is pretty much the end of the road going clockwise, before you get to The Base (PMRF). Dad had showed me the beach once, and I've driven through some of the town a few times on the way to Koke'e (it's on one of the two roads up there), but I'd never really explored it.

I took my bike out, with the intent of biking around Kekaha and maybe Waimea too. I ended up doing just several miles, because it was hot and dry.

I hung out much of the day at the beach at Kekaha. It's pretty windblown and desolate, but there are nice, shaded pavilions, so it was a nice place to write, right on the beach. It was also mostly empty, with just a few (large) local groups out there BBQing on the beach. No tourists. A nice antidote to the Disneyland tourists at Mahaulepu, though while out there I read an article about how some entrepreneur wants to open a huge wave pool right in Kekaha. I can't imagine the county will allow that to happen, but boy it would screw with our traffic if it did, to have a huge tourist attraction out on the backend of the island, and boy it would murder that little community, which is actually a local community, because it's so far from the airport.

After the beach, I biked partway out to PMRF, and decided it was too hot to go that far, then biked around the neighborhoods a bit, and was fascinated by a huge abandoned sugar mill with a towering smoke stack. That was the heart of the town from 1898-2000. Sad to see it rotting away now, but that's the story across Hawaii. I think the coffee plantation and the rum company are some of the few actual production facilities left on this island.

Third Saturday was a trip to the biking trail out on the east side, in Kapaa. I was a bit hesitant about going out there because contraflow has been a nightmare since they started doing road expansion in Kapaa earlier this year, and I hadn't been out there since they expanded contraflow back to Saturdays.

I should explain: a lack of road infrastructure is one of the great sins of Kauai. Since the island started being more welcoming to tourists, I'm not sure when, the population has more than doubled, and the road system has just barely changed. Much of the island is constrained by a highway that's one lane in each direction. So that's problematic. In Kapaa, they're very lucky to have three lanes, two north and one south ... but in the morning most of the traffic is coming from the north. So for decades they've had contraflow where every day they drop down cones in the morning to eat up one of the northbound lanes (and some of the turn lanes) to create a second southbound lane, and then in the late morning or early afternoon, they pick them up.

But the road construction has been playing havoc with that, because when they're contraflowing, they're now having to block a lefthand turn into the Wailua Homesteads, a major residential area, and so any time anyone needs to turn into the Homesteads ... all of the northbound traffic has to wait until they can get across two lanes of rush-hour traffic. Not good.

So I wasn't sure if I wanted to go out to the biking trail Saturday morning, but I looked at the traffic in the morning, and it seemed fine.

So I went to Safeway to pick up some lunch. This was a new innovation. It's pretty much been Walmart and Costco for groceries since we landed on the island, but I wanted to see if Safeway had better bread than the soft and soggy bread that's too common on the island. (They did!) And while there I picked up some old favorites that I haven't had since I landed, such as black-cherry soda and Stax potato chips. It was terrific, and I'm going to have to remember we should stop in Safeway occasionally, and not just be limited by what's at Costco.

And I looked again before I left Safeway, and the traffic was still fine, so off to the trail it was.

And the traffic was fine because it turned out contraflow wasn't going, which was weird.

Anywho, I took my lunch out to the biking trail. Biked out to the first pavilion and ate. Wrote some. Biked out to the end of the trail and then back to Donkey Beach. Landed at a pavilion and wrote more, getting to watch surfing and waves this time. Biked out to the end of the trail again and then finally headed back to the car and eventually to home.

I was reminded again how entirely gorgeous that trail is.

I was also reminded again how easy it is to get my bike onto Julie with the hitch-mounted bike rack I bought. I think I can get the rack and bike on in five minutes or so.

And, I learned I got really lucky with the contraflow. You see Kauai has three trucks that they use to manage the contraflow changes: one to setup signs, one to setup cones, and one to drag a "crash attentuator" (to protect the workers maybe?). One of those trucks had broken down on Friday, so they stopped running contraflow, and I slipped up north the one Saturday that southbound traffic was a nightmare rather than northbound traffic. The County somewhat shockingly said that contraflow was going to be down for another full week while the truck got repaired, which would have been horrible for the Kapaa commuters, but by Tuesday figured out they could use the same truck for both cone and sign setup.

True story.

So those were three varied Saturdays out and about on Kauai.

I don't think I wrote that last month I finally got my bike rack assembled so that I could mount it on Julie the Benz's trailer hitch. For its debut, I used it to take my bike out to the Kauai Trail that runs down the east shore of the island (and will perhaps someday be expanded past its current length, but perhaps not, as NIMBYs exist here on the island too, and they're fighting that expansion). Perhaps not the best choice to use the new rack all the way on the highway out to Kapa'a, but that was what I needed it for.

The Kauai Trail is always a beautiful ride, as it runs right along the ocean, and as is often the case, I got to bike it with my dad and Mary (and afterward headed back up the trail to find a mini-pavilion to write for a few hours).

For the bike rack's second outing, I took it out to Koloa this recent Saturday. This is something I'd been wanting to do for a while, as Koloa is one of the closest areas to us that you can really bike around. And a place that I'm pretty familiar with since we've been going there since 2001. I'd been hoping to bike there when tourists were off the island and there weren't a lot of cars in the area, but even missing that opportunity, I was determined to give it a shot.

Saturday was actually a mess of a morning. I got out to the garage and found that my bike had a flat in the rear tire. This has been an ongoing problem for at least three years now: slow leaks developing in the back tire. I've had bike shops check it out any number of times. I even went to further away bike shops in Berkeley after Mike's Bikes failed me, and I just kept getting the flats until finally I got a tire with sealant goop in it. But that tire totally came apart before one of my outings last year.

Fortunately, I had some goop on hand and I put it into the tire. Unfortunately, afterward the thing wouldn't inflate. @)(#$*)@(#$ goop.

Fortunately I also had a thorn resistant tire on hand. So after the goop failure that went in.

It was still a frustrating morning and I got to Koloa much later than planned.

I landed at Poipu Beach, mainly so that I could drop off recyclables. Ah, the glamour of semi-rural living.

It was so late by that time that I just biked down to the Shops at Kukui'ula for lunch, where I hit my second obstacle of the day: no chicken. Since beef makes me sick, Savage Shrimp it was.

But that was the last obstacle on an otherwise amazing day.

The bike from Poipu to the Shops was great. It was terrific seeing land that I've walked and driven from atop a bike. It felt very empowering.

From there I went all the way out to Spouting Horn, and was amazed how my bike just ate up the miles. Two miles, it turns out. A long walk, which I've done a few times, as far back as 2001 (though the Shops weren't actually there at the time, but our condo was very nearby), and just a quick zooming, beautiful ride on my bike.

I always love getting to sit out somewhere and do some writing on my days out, and I'd chosen Spouting Horn as my most likely locale for the day.

Surprisingly, it was still almost as empty as it was when we had no tourists. The new vendor stalls there are still closed up, the dreaded tour buses are still absent, and so there were at most a dozen people out there at a time, looking at the spout. The picnic tables were mostly empty.

I wrote for almost two hours. Edited and organized and updated really. My most frequent day-out writing currently is The TSR Codex, and I finished my first draft of chapter 9 of book 2.

From there it was back to the Shops, then up Kalanikaumaka to a ride that my dad had suggested: into the actual Kukui'ula subdivision.

This is a luxury housing area (and a luxury golf course) a mile or more up from the shore in western Koloa. There's just the one way in and out, with no access down to the shoreline, to keep all the riff-raff off. My dad thinks it all might be private land, and it sort of looks like that could be the case, but if so there's no signs proclaiming that, so I happily biked in.

It was GORGEOUS. Because this was Richie Rich land, the landscaping was all beautiful, and done in the most authentic (totally-fake-white-privilege) Hawaiian style with all kinds of ferns and other tropical plants. There was actually a surprising lack of no-trespassing signs, given how many I see in less affluent parts of the island. And you could see down to the shore almost the whole ride along.

I was shocked how far the road went. Almost the same two miles I'd ridden on the parallel road to Spouting Horn. Definitely the best part of the ride, and I noticed there were a few walking pathways _also_ not specified as no-trespassing. Future possibilities!

So I'll definitely be back. Maybe I'll get run off some time, when the island gets even more crowded and Boss Hogg gets more vigilant, but Saturday's ride was great.

I did a bit more riding, cutting across Koloa proper, then going down the bypass road on the backside of town, which is one of the few places with an actual bike lane (and thus one of my original plans).

I got back to Poipu about 5.15, and though I'd considered swimming in the afternoon, I decided it was time to come home.

So that was my biking day in Koloa.

It was good to bike around a community, not just along a trail or a backroad. It reminded me a bit of life back in the Bay Area. And there was still plenty gorgeous to see. I'll definitely be back.

(Overall, I really need to figure out how to increase my biking here in Kauai, as it's much better exercise than just walking or even hiking, so I'd like to be doing more of it.)

I was planning to also use this journal entry to talk about my happiness that taxes are done for 2020, and I considered it a major landmark ... but today I got a letter from the Department of Taxation saying they think I owe a lot more money, with the problem apparently being at least in part that they lost a rather large payment I sent them in April. (Fortunately, I have my confirmation number.)

@#)$@*#)#.

So milestone not yet achieved.

And that's the second time in my adult life that a tax authority has lost my tax payments. I mean, seriously, people? You just have one job.

1. Storm. A few nights ago when Kimberly and I were laying down in bed, she exclaimed that something wet had fallen on her hand. A second later the same thing happened to me, and I realized that the whipping wind was driving rain through our louvre windows about six feet into the room. Much window closing followed.

2. Lizards. They keep killing lizards. A few times now we've found a lizard corpse on the floor, just swarming with ants. ICK! I dunno, do these guys just keel over? Are they scared to death by cats? Do the ants assassinate them for a tasty dinner? ICK.

3. Chickens. Lately I get up in the morning and after I shower and get dressed I wander by the front door. And there's a herd of chickens out on the porch. And then I go downstairs, and meanwhile the chickens run around the house to get to the back patio, to beg for food. I swear they are looking for me at the front porch, and know when they see me wake up and wander through there, they can then go get their morning treat. (They're going to be grossly surprised next week, but maybe we can get them back to their core task of eating centipedes. I found one in the bathroom a few days ago!)

4. Quarantine. Kimberly had her COVID test on Tuesday, to allow her to do the seizure study in Oahu. (It came back negative, of course: there's no COVID on this island.) She has to self-quarantine following that. The staff at Queens told me I didn't have to, but nonetheless I'm staying close to home, going out only to walk on the golf course with no one else around (and bike: more on that momentarily). And it feels surprisingly lonely and constraining, even though I gamed (online) on Wednesday, did a Podcast on Thursday, zoomed with my folks today, and have been keeping in touch with several people for various work projects.

5. Plague. Oh, hey, Oahu had 15 new cases of COVID-19 on Friday and 17 on Saturday. Up from about a half-dozen a day the previous week, up from about 1 a day before that. That makes going there tomorrow really attractive. And I know that I've said that the restrictions on these islands (particularly Kauai and the Big Island) are excessive, but still, have the *(@#$#ing common sense not to go to Memorial Day parties and graduation day parties, hmm?

6. Biking. I haven't been biking since I moved to Hawaii. To be precise, I'd biked three times before Thursday, something I realized when talking to my PT about physical activities. So yesterday I did the one bike ride really possible around our house: around Puu Road, which is below and around the golf course. It's a nice ride, 30 or 40 minutes, and a somewhat challenging one because of the ups and downs. Sadly, I am getting out of biking shape. The last bit back up to Papalina was very tiring (and then I walked the bike up Papalina to get home). More of that!

7. Cats. I think Callisto is now afraid of the dark, or at least the dark at our back door. More than once I've found her yowling there or just staring intently, but there's no cat out there lurking as there was in our first weeks here. I turn on the light, and all is well.

8. Dreams. I dreamed a few nights ago that we were back in the Bay Area. That's the first time since we moved here. The house sale had fallen through (in my dream), but we'd gotten $40,000 for our troubles, and that seemed really great, and we were going about life in the Bay Area like everything was terrific. But then at some point I said, "But we were going to change our lives by moving to Hawaii, and that won't happen if we're here." And I realized it had to be a dream and I woke myself up. Whew! Still in Hawaii! Still living a mile from my dad and Mary. Still putting aside the stress of RPGnet and Skotos. Still working on my own projects most days. Still swimming and hiking (and biking!).

9. Toothpaste. So you can't take toothpaste to Oahu. Well, you can't because you're likely doing a casual interisland flight and you don't want to pick-up check-in luggage at Honolulu, a big, messy airport. (You especially don't want to mill around with other luggagers during a pandemic.) So no toothpaste for us tomorrow, nor sunscreen. I'll have to pick it up when we get there (and then we can check in the luggage coming back, because it just takes a few minutes to get it in Lihue).

10. Cleaning. So what do you do on the day before ~~doomsday~~ a trip to the disease capitol of Hawaii? If you're Shannon, you clean. Yes, it's in part because my dad will do some cat-sitting while we're out of town, but also because starting tomorrow I'll have plenty of time for writing in the evenings, but won't be able to putter around the house.

Out of the house right around sunrise tomorrow, because we're catching ~~the last train to Clarksville~~ the first plane to Oahu.

For twenty years, people have been fighting to get bicycle and pedestrian access to the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. And, it should have been an easy sell, because there was one lane on each level of the bridge that wasn't been used (except for breakdowns). But, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission fought against it because they wanted to maintain the ability to jam more cars onto the Bridge, and Marin fought it because ... well, a vocal group in Marin is overentitled and overprivileged, and doesn't want to provide access to their community.

And, that access was needed. I mean, there's almost no way to get across the Bay using bike power. If you go North, you have to go past San Francisco Bay, past San Pablo Bay, out to the edge of the Carquinez Straits before you can cross on the Carquinez Bridge, and then once you get into the north Bay, biking access is terrible, so you have to go about 10 miles more north to get to bikable roads. In the south Bay, the southernmost Bridge, the Dumbarton Bridge, is bikable, but I've never done it because it's a low, ugly Bridge, and I remember commuting across it every day when I worked at Sun, and our trucks were constantly buffeted by the wind, to the point where I can barely imagine biking across it and living.

Maybe the Bay Bridge will someday have bike access across it, but that's at least a decade off, so the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge was people's great hope. And it opened to bicycles and pedestrians (but mostly bicycles) today.

The story of bicycle and pedestrian access to the bridge is entirely one of advocacy. It wouldn't have happened, no way no how, without Bike East Bay and others. Even so, they fought for six years after it looked like they had a foothold. And both Marin and the MTC are continuing to fight now. The MTC tried to turn it into a non-rush-hour-only bike path about halfway through the process, and the Marinites are still trying to get the four-year pilot program canceled.

I'm not convinced it's going to survive long-term, especially since it's never going to be a major bike commute. It's just too long. At 5.5 miles, it was the first or second longest bridge in the world (depending on how you count it) when it was built. And that's ignoring the fact that the east side is way out at Point Richmond and the west side is miles from downtown San Rafael. But for a pleasure ride, and for access to Marin for a weekend day. It's magnificent.

I purposefully went a little late, because I didn't want to hang around the ribbon-cutting ceremont at 10, nor did I want to have to fight with huge crowds on the bridge. So I meandered out, had lunch at my favorite Oscar's replacement in Point Richmond, then got to the Bridge around 1pm.

The whole time I was heading toward the Bridge from Point Richmond, I saw people coming back, many talking about how great the ride was. The numbers increased as I approached the Bridge, and though it was never crowded, I really felt a part of this community of bicyclists, and it was a great feeling. Pretty soon I had a broad smile on my face whenever anyone went by. I might admit to getting a little emotionally choked up too.

And they were right, the ride was great. It was really foggy as I approached the Bridge, but pretty soon I ascended above it. And since the bike trail is on the upper deck, I could really see everything. It was like I was out on the ocean, with a sea of clouds, and mountains rising all around me. It was like being on Avalon. And unlike the Dumbarton (and the Bay Bridge for that matter) it wasn't particularly windy. Instead, it was just a magnificent ride, up above the whole world, with the beauty of nature all around, and smiling people occasionally going by.

I was a bit worried about the difficulty of the ride because the roads up to the Bridge always looked long and steep to me. But the ride from Richmond proved to be quite doable, with the only gotcha being that the Bridge is made up of two cantilevered sections, with a big dip between them.

And, as it turns out, I can't speak about the approach from San Rafael. People certainly did look more winded coming from that direction, and the drop into San Rafael felt long and steep (but I couldn't even see what it looked like, because I descended into the fog, and pretty soon couldn't see much of anything).

So yay for a bike ride I thought I'd never take, because the March 2019 opening kept getting push back to back, to the point where we were only about 45 days from our planned departure on today, when it opened.

The downside of the Bridge is, of course, that it comes down in San Rafael. I'd say the ugly part of San Rafael, but I haven't actually seen the attractive part yet, if there is one. But you have a mess of highways and very busy roads, and San Quentin Prison, and a lot of unattractive industrial areas.

I meandered further into San Rafael, wanting to check out the bike paths along the new SMART train line, and found those pretty unattractive too, pretty much just a fenced path running alongside railway tracks. (It'll be nicer in 50 years when SMART fails, and it turns into a full greenway.) And then I ended up dumped from the path into a more commercial area, and there were huge masses of cars on big streets everywhere.

That's where a lady started screaming at me to get in a bike lane like everyone else. Obviously, she was at a pretty low level of moral development, since her basis for doing things was "what everyone else did". But what really confused me was that there was no bike lane. "What bike lane?" I said. "There's no bike lane." But she just kept screaming about how everyone else was using the bike lane that wasn't there, and I should too. I finally decided that she'd fulfilled her lifelong dream of moving to Marin County, but it turned out to be shitty San Rafael.

(Maybe the northern half of San Rafael is prettier. If so, this woman, who seemed very displeased with life, doesn't live there.)

I thought about continuing through that icky commercial area, because I saw more off-street bike lanes further north, and suspected they were more SMART-adjacent lines, but then I remembered a long-time dream I'd had: doing a mighty bike ride from RIchmond BART to San Francisco, across two Bridges — and truly showing the power of the new Richmond-San Rafael bike path, which opens up both peninsulas to bicyclists from the East Bay.

I looked it up on my trusty iPhone and was told I could make it in 2 hours and 1 minute, which would put me in the Tenderloin just as twilight descended. I decided to go for it. (It ended up taking me about an hour longer, getting into Civic Center BART around 6pm, so I actually got to see the Tenderloin in full dark: "Why did everything suddenly get so sketchy?" I would ask, as I biked along Polk, and then I realized where I was.)

I've done the north part of that ride before, through the super-cool CalPark Hill Tunnel, which gets you out of ugly San Rafael and into beautiful Larkspur. They were still building up the connectors south last time I was there (after taking the scant one bus out to San Rafael), but they're all done now, so you get to bike over to the attractive Corte Madira Creek and southward for quite a while before really having to worry about roads.

Though 101 is a constant presence as you head south, the bike paths are nice and the rest of the scenery is beautiful, with hills often surrounding you on two or three sides and waterways frequently snaking in from the Bay. I continued on into Corte Madira proper, then around a nice hillside road, and into Mill Valley. That's perhaps the most gorgeous area I biked through, with all the water and hills interfacing so nicely. And also it's where the start of the Mill Valley - Sausalito Bikeway is: another entirely off-road trail that took me a few miles further south.

I skirted Sausalito, and remembered fondly the Anniversary that Kimberly and I spent there some years ago, even stopping to take a picture at the building where we failed to have our Anniversary dinner (because the place we'd thought we'd made reservations at had gone out of business). And then exiting Sausalito I started to climb again, as I approached the Marin Headlands and the Golden Gate Bridge.

The closer I got to the Golden Gate, the more fog I saw, blocking out more of San Francisco and much of Bridge #2. And when I got onto the Golden Gate Bridge again it was even foggier than the first: this time I was right in the fog.

And that was another amazing experience. I often could see no more than 10 or 20 feet ahead, so it was like I was in my own little world. It was actually wet! When I took the sharp turn around the southern tower (slow! I did it slowly!), I almost wiped out because of the slick surface. But I could make out the towers as I approached them, and every once in a while bicyclists would materialize from the fog.

Eventually, I made it to San Francisco, tired not just from the ride, but also from the effort of watching so carefully in the fog.

The fog cleared as I descended down from the Bridge, and from there it was the same route I took during Fleet Week, with the exception of a stop at Ghirardelli Square for some chocolate (of course). Sadly, they no longer had Kimberly's favorite: malted milkballs.

And then it was a tiring ride up Polk, a quick turn through the Tenderloin, and perfect BART karma when I hit the platform.

Yes, we have problems at home. Yes, there is stress from the move, and yes Kimberly is getting (much) more than her fair share of stress from not just cancer, but also a doctor who hasn't gotten his pathology of the same out to anyone in a full week.

But that was a perfect ride that I've dreamed of for years, a great day of exercise, a great day of natural beauty, and a bit of destressing for myself before diving back into the scrum.

Ugh. The last two weeks have been endless. I look back and I think "That was just a week ago?", "That was this Tuesday?"

And my work on the move has come to a grinding halt.

Unfortunately, this has largely been centered on Kimberly's health, and she just hasn't been catching any breaks.

A week and a half ago, we thought we'd figured out her "cognitive episodes" and that the appointment she went to that Monday to look at her EEG was a waste of time. Except the EEG showed her having small seizures on the left side of the brain while the EEG was going on. So she was diagnosed with a seizure disorder.

The thing is that she hadn't had any notable (large-scale?) episodes for a full two weeks before that, since we changed out our laundry detergent for something scent-free, and I rewashed not just our bedsheets, but the entire contents of our linen closet. But her neurologist said he thought that was just a coincidence. Since she was having three or four seizures a week before that, I find it hard to believe. My suspicion is that she's now experiencing chemical sensitivities and they're triggering the seizures. But chemical sensitivities are often poo-pooed by doctors, including their possible relationship to seizures. But we can accept this medical diagnosis, and meanwhile see if we can help prevent them.

(In the week and a half since then, Kimberly has had three episodes that I know of, once when she was at a friend's house, and twice when we had people over, so that's unfortunately up from those two blissful seizure-free weeks, but they're still all in situations when she could have been exposed to unusual chemicals.)

Last Monday night we went through the endless process of bringing our real-estate agent on to sell our house. We literally spent hours going over forms and signing them. Our realtor, B., said the forms had gotten much more extensive since when we bought our house 19 years ago, and they'd be even worse if we were buying.

Well, none of that for now: we have a house waiting for us in Kauai.

And I got some new stuff for my TODO list: get our attic door replaced and talk to stagers.

Meanwhile, I also got a DocuSign copy of our agreement with our shippers sometime during the week.

For whatever reason, I put it all off to Friday ... and then things went to hell.

I was in the shower last Friday when Kimberly messaged me from her GI office, to let me know what was previously thought to be a growth in her kidney had turned out to be a tumor in her colon. And the GI office was frantic about it. They eventually set up a colonoscopy to do a biopsy on Tuesday.

Tuesday, Katherine took us out to Walnut Creek for the colonoscopy, and we waited around for a few hours while the GI doctor did the procedure.

And thus far we know ... very little. Full results of the biopsy are due next week; I'll be going with Kimberly to a very early appointment with her GI on Thursday morning to find out what's happening.

This type of existential emergency in your family really throws everything on its head. Kimberly, of course, has been very upset, and I've been offering what support I can. Meanwhile, my own work has been tough going. I only started to get the least back in the swing of things on Wednesday, several days after Kimberly got that first report. And I didn't touch Bitmark work until last night, and I haven't done a thing on the move since our talk with our realtor.

And I'd all but forgotten that we went out with Kimberly's friend J. for lunch on Friday after the bad news. It all blurs together.

And I'd all but forgotten that PG&E's irresponsible and doublethink "public safety power outage" was occurring at the same time as all of this. We didn't get hit by it, but I was worried we might as PG&E was grossly inaccurate with their maps, showing for example that UC Berkeley was fine, when the entire campus got shut down.

Governor Newsom is now encouraging municipalities to buy up PG&E facilities, since PG&E has proven themselves feloniously incompetent. If only he had some power where he could force a takeover of PG&E. Yes, it would be tied up in court for years, but that's a first step that's badly needed.

I have been doing my best to relax when I can. Last Saturday I biked across the Golden Gate and into the Marin headlands. I took Monday off for the holiday that shall not be named and did a hike to the back of Strawberry Canyon. Today, I got back on my bike and went out to Wildcat Canyon.

(Turns out I haven't been to Wildcat in a while. I was delighted to discover two nasty cross-streets on the bikeway north of El Cerrito del Norte are now four-way steps, which makes that ride much nicer. I was less delighted when I detoured over to San Pablo Dam Road for lunch and discovered that area is now infected with RVs parked all over; I just don't know where they all come from.)

A bit of problem when I got up to Wildcat. After huffing and puffing my way up the first hill, leading to Wildcat Canyon Trail from the Alvarado area of the park, I found a sign that said the Wildcat Canyon Trail was closed between Wildcat Canyon and Tilden.

Great. That's pretty much the way you get from one park to the other (and the nostalgic trail that I wanted to ride).

I considered biking on up and seeing how closed the trail really was. I've been able to bull through more than one "closed" trail like that. But, bulling through a closed trail is harder with a bike, so instead I decided to go up to the ridgeline at the back of the park, and then take the Nimitz Way over to Inspiration Point.

Unfortunately, the paths up to the ridge line are pretty steep in the Wildcat Canyon Park. And I took a new path (perhaps the only path I'd never walked in Tilden or Wildcat Canyon, which went up past the ruins of an 1800s private "sanitarium") and it was really steep. I knew I'd be walking my bike up most of the hillside, but one section was so steep that I didn't think I'd be able to get up it at all with my bike. I stopped a half-dozen times over the course of a few hundred yards.

(A jogger went by in the opposite direction at my fourth or fifth stop on that near-vertical climb. "Windy, huh?" he said. Neither of us commented on my struggle up the hill.)

When I finally got up to the ridgeline, it was all clouds, fog, and marine layer. At times I couldn't see 50 feet ahead of me. And occasionally I'd hit a forested area and it was raining! The ride wasn't pleasant the first bit when that tremendous wind was buffeting me, but once I got past that it was weird and neat, with the gray fog covering everything and water occasionally misting into me.

Oh, and did I mention that the Wildcat Canyon Trail was closed due to "storm damage"? This is an increasing problem in Bay Area parks, where trails are closed due to "storm damage" for extended periods of time: we haven't had storms for five months at this point. It could easily be closed a year or two from now, due to that same storm damage.

I'm not sure they ever get fixed at this point: the signs just eventually fall down and the tread of feet finds its way around the damage.

Meanwhile back in the real world ...

Poor Kimberly just wants to sleep until next week, and it's entirely understandable. Me, I want to get back to a normal head-space where I can get things done.

But we've still got a long ways to go on her newest health problem. We need results of that biopsy, and there will almost definitely be surgery. And then depending on the results, Kimberly might have to fight through chemotherapy too. And if that happens, that's going to put us past January 1st, at which point we have to decide what in the world to do, because we've put a lot of effort into that January 1st move date, and there are financial issues if things get stalled out.

So, stressful times. Much, much more stressful for Kimberly than me. But for me it's on top of feeling like I need to be the one leading the way on the move, because Kimberly wasn't up to it healthwise, even before these latest few problems.

Ay.

Hey, had my own yearly physical this recent Thurday. I almost put it off, because I was stressed with the rest of the world, but I'd been putting it off since spring, because things always seemed too busy, and I wanted to have it done at least a few months before our move.

And I was stressed about getting my blood test results. Because as we've learned, you can never tell what's going on inside. But they just showed pretty much exactly the same thing as my last tests. My blood sugar is just barely into the high range (but some longer-term sugar blood tests are within range) and my triglycerides are high. Not perfect, but neither of those numbers seem to be moving, so I'll call that fine and get back to my plan already in process to lose a bit of weight.

Meanwhile, instead of sleeping this afternoon, Kimberly filed while I biked. So she's probably done more on the move in the last two weeks than me. But tomorrow I'm going to get back into that saddle ...

Every once in a while I post how many days we have remaining in the Bay Area over on Facebook. And, I wouldn't want to give anyone the wrong impression. I'm not counting down the days left until we get to go to Hawaii; I'm counting the days left that I get to enjoy California.

And that's the great thing about making this five-year plan to move. It's given me a lot of time to really appreciate what I have here in the Bay Area and make the most of it.

And it's given us plenty of time to prepare for our move as well.

Mind you, that preparation got more difficult this last week, when Kimberly got hammered with multiple health problems, one of which has resulted in emergency surgery for her on Tuesday. It's just one more thing that we really didn't need to deal with, but poor Kimberly has to, and it feels at times overwhelming when added on to all the work to prepare our house for sale and ourselves to move.

But, it is what it is, and we are persevering.

Anywho, I was talking about saying goodbye to the Bay Area.

In the last few weeks, pretty much as summer faded into fall, I've become increasingly aware of how little time we have left here.

So, I've been waking the fire trails up above Clark Kerr whenever I have a chance, and I got to see a few beautiful sunsets up there. A few weeks ago I took the bus up to Tilden, then walked up to Inspiration Point and down the fire trails to San Pablo Dam. Last weekend I had lunch at the Oscar's-replacement in Point Richmond, had a nice ride through Point Pinole (since you can now use it as a thoroughfare, with the two new entrances they've opened in recent years), and after a flat-tire adventure that led to a three-mile walk to the nearest bike shop, revisited Kennedy Grove. (I'd planned to go up a nice creek trail that I enjoy on the border between Pinole and Hercules, but ended up being in the wrong place and not have time after the puncture problem.)

These are all places that I know and am familiar with, and wanted to see again.

And Saturday I went out to The City, with the intention of visiting Golden Gate Park and The Golden Gate Bridge.

I love the fact that Golden Gate Park is huge and rambling (bigger than NY's Central Park!). I love that it has hidden nooks and crannies, some just off the beaten path, some mostly abandoned for decades.

Kimberly and I used to head out there every once in a blue moon, grab sandwiches from the nearby Andronico's (now a Safeway in all but name, with a commiserate drop in sandwich quality) and enjoy them in the Fern Grotto (or as I call it, "Fern Gully"), just above the National AIDS Memorial Grove. And, we haven't in years, since sometime before she broke her foot, and we probably won't again, sad as that is to say.

I decided to remember that on my own on Saturday. So I hauled my bike on BART, then Wiggle-d my way up to the Park.

I found a nearby sandwich place called "The Yellow Submarine", which I've seen before from the bus. When I got there I saw they advertised "Boston-style" sandwiches. Which turned out to be Philly cheesesteaks. Which amused me, because everyone else in the world calls them Philly cheesteaks, not Boston sandwiches, but maybe there's some Eastern rivalry thing going on there. Anywho, my chicken cheesesteak was stasty, and I enjoyed it in Fern Gully, and that was pretty much my visit to the Park.

(Other than some biking through it here, and there, which was nice, as always.)

From the Park, I biked straight up into the Presidio to get to the Bridge. There was one section which was straight up hill which took some effort. I immediately recognized it as a nemesis that I'd visited before, but I made it up the hill all on my bike, albeit with two rests along the way.

Biking through the Presidio was even more beautiful than biking through Golden Gate Park, because you get gorgeous coastal views along the way.

And then I was approaching the Bridge.

I had to swerve around a clump of meandering pedestrians as I ramped up onto the western side of the bridge, reserved for bicyclists. I kindly told the tourists that there were no pedestrians allowed on this side as I went, but they seemed pretty oblivious. So maybe they spent the next 30 minutes dodging bikes and wondering what was going on.

The ride across the Bridge was MAGICAL.

I mean, it's always a gorgeous ride, but as I'd hoped, the Blue Angels started flying over the Bay as I biked across, every once in a while making it over to the Bridge. I think it was mostly the warm-ups, as I only saw one at a time, at least then. But still it was just amazing seeing them up in the sky as I biked across. I pulled over ra few times to gawp.

(It was Fleet Week, if it's not obvious. I don't think I've ever been into the City for Fleet Week before, though I saw them circling up in the sky in a recent year when I was over at Point Richmond. But this time I knew it was Fleet Week and purposefully scheduled this trip to the City for that. As I hoped, it didn't make things too crowded, but was a wonderful spectacle for one of my last trips into the City.)

Once over the Bridge, I crossed over to the View Vista Point above Fort Baker, and from there was able to watch the Blue Angels for awhile from afar. There were more of them now, circling and looping and making amazing dives, mostly above the Embarcadero. On the bright side, no deeply rumbling afterburners right above, but they were pretty far away.

I wished I'd brought my binoculars, instead of just my better camera, but it was still pretty amazing.

My last activity for my day in San Francisco (and now Marin) was to hike up the SCA Trail above the North Tower Parking Lot.

And here, the trip became entirely magical again, because I'd hike a few hundred yards, and then I'd hear the jets, and they'd be close enough to see. A few times a set of four of them zoomed right over the headlands. One time, one went spinning over head. Sometimes I'd be on the same chunk of trail as other hikers, and we'd all stop and look up. It was amazing! Though the mile hike up the SCA trail took quite a long time as a result!

I eventually got to where the SCA Trail meets the Coastal Trail, and it was getting late, and Kimberly had had a seizure episode back at a friend's house, and so I wanted to get back. So I looked at those other beautiful trails headed into the distance, imagined walking them, and turned around.

I'd never realized quite how many trails there are in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and from there into Muir and beyond. It's an amazing area that I'd love to hike more, but pretty far from our house by BART and bike. And there are only 80 days left. And the weather is quickly turning cold and gray.

I had to thread through crowds as I biked through Crissy Field and around Fort Mason on the way back, but eventually I found Polk Street, which took me back to Civic Center BART.

Along the way, I powered up a hill (one of a few on the route), and passed two people on the electric Ford bikes, and thought, "They're doing something wrong".

And within a few hours of leaving the Marin Headlands, I was home in Berkeley.

The Bay Area is an amazing place full of natural beauty. I'm glad I've been able to really mindfully enjoy it these last few years. And I'm sorry Kimberly hasn't been able to join me for much of it due to health reasons. Having a car in Kauai will probably be a big, helpful change in that regard.

My number of Saturdays in the Bay Area is rapidly diminishing. The next two will be spent in Prague, then summer will slowly ebb away, and there will only be rain and cold left.

So I'm trying to take best advantage of the scant free Saturdays I have left.

Last weekend I went to Coyote Hills, west of Fremont. It's been on my map to visit for years, but heading all the way down to Fremont is a bit of a trek, so I've usually visited closer places.

On the way, I forgot that Union City existed. Probably not the first time that's happened to someone. But I looked at the distance to Coyote Hills from South Hayward and then the distance from Fremont, and decided that Fremont was the closer BART station. So I watched South Hayward go by, then I jumped off at the next BART station. And I was confused, because it looked wrong: too fancy and high-tech and nice looking to be the Fremont BART station. And that's when I remembered that Union City existed and I'd gotten off there.

Close enough: have bike, will travel.

Funny story #1: I used to travel to the Union City BART station really regularly. Back when I worked for Sun in the mid '90s, that was where you got off to take the Sun shuttle across the Bay to Mountain View. But, that was like 25 years ago.

Funny story #2: Union City BART was actually the station closest to Coyote Hills, not South Hayward, and not Fremont.

The trek to Coyote Hills is great, because it's almost entirely along the Alameda Creek Trail, which is a pleasant creek-side trail. (Well, creek undersells it. It's a big marshy waterway that's mostly dried up this time of year and where you often can't see that the water because of all the plants. But you get the idea.) Also, like those creek-side trails just a bit further south in San Jose, it ducks under all the road crossings. So you literally can bike without stop for miles and miles.

I've written elsewhere that Fremont's bikeways are pretty crappy going north-south, not picking up until you hit Milpitas. And that's true. But this east-west trail is great.

As you go along it, you see all kinds of neighborhoods. A lot look like the quiet, tree-covered suburban neighborhoods that remind me more of St. Louis than where I grew up. (Where I grew up in San Jose didn't have many trees, being a new subdivision, and no public areas, like some of the parks I spotted near the Creek Trail in Fremont.) But there were also condos nearer the highway that were clearly very expensive despite their tiny, soulless footprints. And then as I got quite near the Bay, everything turned more industrial, and I felt like I was biking through a wasteland.

I'm pretty sure I've never been to Coyote Hills before. It was a very nice park.

That was obvious from the start due to its bike-friendliness. The Alameda Creek Trail took you to paths that took you straight across the park to its center, where the visitor center was. No having to bike up a car-filled main road to get there! And, it was clear that this easy, accessible route was well used. I saw large numbers of bicyclists on the Alameda Creek Trail and on these paths into the park itself.

The park had a lot more amenities than most East Bay Regional parks that I've visited. As I said, there was a visitor center. And right next to it a butterfly garden (that, truth to tell, didn't have a lot of butterflies). The visitor center also spent a lot of effort advertising the whole East Bay Regional park system. There was one map that showed them all and allowed you to flag what you liked about your "favorite". (There were no blank flags, but I probably would have been a Berkeley loyalist and said, "TILDEN, for quiet lunches at Jewel Lake and for connecting paths to all the nearby parks and trails." From Tilden you can literally walk to San Pablo, Pleasant Hill, or Castro Valley, never stepping off a park trail, except to cross an occasional street.) There was also a whole display of brochures with maps of various East Park parks. I looked in despair at how many I still hadn't visited. Ah well, I've seen a lot more than most East Bay residents, I expect. And I did grab maps for two parks I want to see near Castro Valley: one just north of the city and one just south.

That'll be one of my scant remaining Saturdays, maybe as it starts to chill, and I'm looking southward for warmer places.

The park itself is an impressive and beautiful interface of marshland and hills. When I looked across parts of the park where I could see both, it was breathtaking.

I did a little bit of hiking while out there, just up to the top of the ridge overlooking the Bay and back. It was pretty, but a rare case where it was nicer looking back at the land on the near side of the Bay.

And after that I took my bike out to circle around the back of the hills by the Bayside trail. Also pretty, and probably a bit of the Bay Trail that I'd never done before, but I've long ago given up trying to circle the south bay on the trail: it's just all too far from public transit (though with my riding to and from San Jose in recent years, I've probably ridden most of the Bay Trail from the Guadalupe River in San Jose eastward, with other travels taking me all the way to Benicia and Martinez, but to the west I don't think I've ridden anything from the Guadalupe River up to SFO.

Overall, a park well worth visiting, though I enjoyed the ride along the Alameda Creek almost as much.

This Saturday was supposed to be gaming, but D. and M. both had other plans, so instead it was a bonus free-day. Which isn't a bad thing when I'm going to Prague in less than a week.

I'd been thinking about Point Richmond lately, I think because I'd been reading about work on the trails leading to the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, so I decided to go up there, and also to visit the nice little hamburger place in Point Richmond which is the closest I've found to Oscar's since they sold out.

I rode the Ohlone and Richmond Greenways, and wondered if it might be my last bikeride along them. Maybe not: there are four months left. But that's not the sort of thing I'm likely to do when I'm back in town visiting, as the Ford GoBikes annoying limit you to 30 or 45 minute trips, making you swap out bikes a few times if you want to do a longer ride. (The one place that I felt had a reasonable bike share was Berlin, which used DonkeyRepublic and allowed you to rent a bike for a day, not the ridiculous $12/hour of the GoBikes if you go past the 30 or 45 minutes. Maybe other places will catch up with them.)

As usual, the Ohlone Greenway was pleasant and under construction. (Currently, the construction is at the El Cerrito Del Norte BART station, and doesn't actually impact the Greenway at the moment, though there are fences up against it.) As usual, the Richmond Greenway travels through a post-apocalyptic urban wasteland. Most of that continues to be on the eastern half, where the Greenway was actual clean today, but there was knee-high rubbish adjacent to the Greenway everywhere. The western half, meanwhile, continues to try and become a true community resource with even more parks and benches going in thanks to the new construction of an apartment complex ... but most of the actual people on the Greenway continue to be homeless.

And I was shocked when I left the Richmond Greenway east of the Richmond Parkway to find that there was indeed new bicycle infrastructure. It used to just dump you out into the street, because they'd never been able to get access to the unused last few blocks of old railway right-of-way. But now that street had a bollard-protected cycle way. It was never too bad a street to ride on, but nonetheless yay! Even more importantly, there's a new crosswalk linked to the cycleway on the north side of the Richmond Parkway. This used to be a critical gap in the biking infrastructure, because you had to cross three sides of a busy street with a very slow light to get into Point Richmond. No more! The cycleway leads right to a walk button, and then on the other side continues all the way into Point Richmond. Amazing!

I had my lunch, and it was an acceptable Oscar's substitute, and then I followed the signs promising access to the Richmond-Point Rafael bridge.

The bridge was supposed to open to bicyclists this Spring. It of course, did not, because CalTrans never met a schedule that they didn't miss. The newest date is fall, which could mean as late as 10 days before we leave, but I actually suspect will be later and thus going on the (personal) trash heap of things that opened too late in the Bay Area for us to enjoy, right alongside Berryessa BART (which I think is hitting a year late, after they said it was going to open *early*).

Anywho, I knew I wasn't going to get on the bridge, but I hoped I might get to see the path up there and maybe get over to Point Molate, an otherwise inaccessible bit of Bay Area land.

No love! I could see the paths that go under the highway to Point Molate, and they looked done, but they were all still closed off. I also got my closest view of Point Molate from bike, and I hadn't realized what an industrial wasteland it was. (On the maps it looks just like a big empty space.)

Ah well. The industrial wasteland was probably sour.

So after that I biked back to Knox Miller Regional Shore, which is on the backside of Point Richmond. It's a nice little park with a lake and views of the Bay and lots of tables. I've enjoyed working out here many a time, though I have to ask if this is a last too.

I'm typing and posting this from one of those picnic tables.

Saturday I went down to San Jose for the third time this year for gaming at Donald & Mary's house.

It's a full-day affair. I leave the house at 10.30, get to Donald's & Mary's around 1, leave between 5 and 6, and get home between 8 and 8.30. But, I've been enjoying biking around San Jose. There are no great routes from Warm Springs BART to Berryessa unless I go way out of my way, but I enjoy biking the suburbs, which remind me of the quiet communities that I grew up in, and I love the hillside roads, which remind me of the landscape of my youth. And there are any number of bike lanes going along long north-south roads, which make it all feel perfectly safe, for the most part.

(Fremont, Milpitas, and San Jose aren't great yet. There's very little in the way of dedicated bike routes unless you get up into the hills or over to the Guadalupe River or way down to the southern part of Coyote Creek, but most of the roads feel OK, with the exception of when I zipped around the Great Mall of Milpitas yesterday and twice had to merge across cars going too fast to get to the Food Court of their Dreams.)

And I enjoy seeing all the new construction. Oh, the office parks that I have to assume appeared in the '90s are pretty ugly, but it's great seeing how much the light rail is changing the face of the cities, with parks and plazas (and apartments) popping up around them.

I think it's been a nice thing to do this last year in California: regularly visiting where I grew up (and I really need to schedule a full-day biking and hiking trip down there sometime too).

Sunday was this year's open Sunday Streets in Berkeley, and so I headed out there after lunch with enthusiasm.

Only to discover that Berkeley has split its Sunday Streets into two "separate but equal" festivals, one for the rich people of North Berkeley and one of the scum living in the rest of the city. Seriously, City of Berkeley, it's not a great look to have one festival for the rich, white, old NIMBYs who live in North Berkeley, and another for the poor, minority, young students who live in South Berkeley. Especially when you hold the North Berkeley festival first so that no one would end up there after attending the other festival.

Aside from the oh-so-typical NIMBY discrimination, it kind of defeats much of the purpose of the festival. Once, Sunday Streets stitched together Berkeley south to north. You could bike or walk almost two miles, get outside your comfort zone and view the longest commercial strip in the city. Now, well, I could walk from Durant to University, a total of six blocks. Yay?

Kind of happy I'm not going to see this travesty again.

With that said, the abbreviated, separated festival was nice. There's always a community feel to it, and it felt like the community activities were trending upward again, with music and street soccer, and (my favorite) people sitting around painting Van Gogh's sunflowers.

Meanwhile, it feels like the packing is two steps forward, one step back. I've just cleared all my single-issue comics out, for example, for hopeful pickup at 10am tomorrow, but then I filled that closet with games that I'm culling. But it's a process, and one that's taking extra time and organization because we're doing our best to find homes for everything we're getting rid of.

I was feeling a little burned out toward the middle of last week, but then I got freaked out at the end of the week as I made plane reservations for Prague for September and talked about the possibility of having to go to Austin in August and realized that I'd be losing valuable packing time, especially since any of those will cause burnout extending days or weeks past the trips. I mean, I knew that the summer months would be my prime time for lots of work, and we're now 5/8th past that.

So, I've been double or triple timing. We're now somewhere around 50 boxes packed and 70 culled ...

Saturday (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.)

My stress level is running high right now.

I've been mainly attributing that to two work-related issues.

The first is the resurgence of discussion about Zak S. in the roleplaying scene, due to the revelations about his (horrific!) abusive relationships. It's all to the good, since Zak's supporters are finally giving him the boot. But for me at least it's caused introspection. It's been cathartic, working through it all, mostly in entries here, and also in reading lots of discussions. But exhausting too.

The second is one that I can't talk about at the moment, but has to do with a problematic Skotos player. More on that momentarily.

But these guys are really just the tip of the iceberg. The straw(s) that broke the camels back. Because things have been stressful for a while.

It's been a year and a half since Kimberly went non-weight-bearing because of her broken foot that we discovered in October of 2017, right around when I went to Berlin. And that has been increasing my home workload for that whole time, because she can't do many of our shared chores any more, and she also needs help with tasks like getting her lunch most days.

And, it's been a half-year since her surgery this last Halloween, after which we learned that the doctor had botched the procedure. He'd told her that the worst that could happen if she elected for the surgery is that he might nick a nerve, and that would slowdown the recovery. But we now know that he cut at least a couple of nerves and left them embedded in the scar tissue. And he was a cold, terse prick when Kimberly told him this. This fact of this botched surgery has exacted a heavy toll on our household. Kimberly is understandably very upset that this doctor may have both crippled her and left her with crippling pain. It's been messing with her ability to manage on a daily basis; and, not even just due to concern for the future, not just due to the anger with the doctor (though I have a *lot* more of that than her), but also from the fact that she has constant pain and it often impacts her ability to function and sleep. And, I've also been impacted by this all emotionally, both personally and supportively.

And finally there's been the stress of the early year at Skotos. We had a big SmartCustody workshop that we did for cryptocurrency at the end of January and now we're gearing up for our semi-annual Rebooting the Web of Trust workshop, about a month later, right at the start of March. Oh, and it's in Spain, which means that things are going to get really hectic in about a week when the long air travel begins.

So, though those two problematic users have been weighing on me, in many ways they're pretty minor in the scope of things: in their interactions with me, and in their likely long-term effect on ... anything. But when you have a plateful of stress already, a few final ingredients can add a lot.

So, Saturday. I definitely wanted to get out of the house to be active and try and burn some of my stress away, but it was cold and raining. I was just about to go for a walk to get lunch ... when the sky cleared up. I looked at the RADAR maps and saw the biggest bit of storm had moved past us. Yay!

So instead of walking to lunch, it was more extensive biking. I had a meandering day down by the Bay. I explored Fourth Street (The taco place I was considering for lunch was jammed due to some three-little pigs public show, so I moved on). I biked the Aquatic Park (Occasional huge puddles). I got lunch in Emeryville. I biked out the Emeryville Marina, then walked along the rustic boardwalk back (An overprivileged white lady yelled at me for biking on a multiuse trail that allows biking; I assume she was from one of the super-rich condo complexes out in that area, and used to getting what she wanted, which she did not). I biked back along the Bay Trail to Berkeley (WINDY!!). And then I biked home. Overall, a nice day.

Biking helps keep the cold mostly away, though I felt it some in that really nasty wind I got on the Bay Trail leg of my trip.

Unfortunately, my stresslessness was immediately lost because Kimberly was upset when I got home (over something small, but that's because the big things are always weighing at the moment) and then I got a certified letter from the problematic Skotos player delivered to my HOME address (which I refused for good reasons, and that's all a whole other story that I hope to be able to write about in several months time). So my stress came right back, though Kimberly helped a bit by buying us Taco Bell for dinner.

And we found a new light TV show to start watching, which I've heard great things about in its later years: Person of Interest. It's relatively shallow in its first season, but we liked it enough to watch the first five episodes over the course of the extended holiday weekend.

On Sunday I didn't exactly do any stress reduction, but I did just hang out at home all day without worrying about rushing out and getting exercise or getting sundries or anything. (And I also did some filing work, toward my goal for moving forward in the preparations for our move to Hawaii.)

And Monday. Today I went out to Lafayette, biked up Happy Valley Road, then hiked up Panorama Road to get into Briones Regional Park. This was I think my third trip into the huge park. I entered up at the northwest corner, and circled down to a creek and back. This directly connected to my second trip when I'd walked the Lafayette Ridge Trail; my entrance today was right by Russell Peak, which is I think where I turned around last time.

I'd been planning to go all the way to the entrance right near Briones Reservoir, which would have been another 2 miles or so there and back. But it was muddy, oh sooooo muddy. One of the paths I was taking was pretty much a stream. Thankfully, I had my hiking shoes, but I still had mud spatter up to my knees. And that was all exhausting, both the walking through the mud and the being careful not to slide and land in the mud. So I turned back that mile early.

In looking at the maps I also thought, wow, it would be great to walk through the corner of Briones Regional Park, down along the Reservoir, then around the corner of San Pablo Reservoir, then back to the Orinda BART. That would definitely be an all-day affair though, since among other things I couldn't take my bike with me since I'd be starting and ending at different BART stations, and that would add a few miles getting to the park (and a few miles getting back from the Reservoir).

Maybe some nice summer day, when I'm more willing to get started early (as opposed to today, when I was like: I'm not rushing out when it's in the mid-40s!) and able to go later.

And I got home today, and despite a quick trip to CVS for Kimberly, managed to stay chill.

And hopefully that'll last into this week before my Spain trip.

With the constant rain of the last week, I decided to bike up the Lafayette-Moraga trail so that I could see the Moraga Falls about two-thirds of the way up that trail. They're very shy falls that only come out after extended and long rain. Otherwise, they tend to disappear almost as soon as the rain does.

And, the falls mission was successful. The falls were going as strongly as I've ever seen it. I'm not sure I'll see them again before we move, so that was terrific.

I had lunch at the picnic area just beyond. As I continued further, I was very disappointed to discover the last mile of the trail is STILL blocked due to a landslide at least two years ago. So I backtracked once again, as I have previously when I hit that non-marked, non-detoured trail. Then went out to the road. Well, it's not as bad as right afterward when the trail was blocked and also the bridge on the road just beneath it, which literally took you miles out of your way.

Circling around I did ride the last half-mile or so of the Trail, past the bridge, and that drops you right off at the Valle Vista Staging Area, the southernmost EBMUD hiking area. I've previously hiked a lot of the accessible EBMUD trails in that area, from St. Mary's College to the Laguna Rancho Park, and from the Laguna Rancho Park to the newly opened Carr Ranch. Since this is the next entrance to trails in that area, it felt like a nice complement, so I decided to brace the post-rain mud afterall.

After accidentally looping around the short Riche Loop trail, I decided to walk the King's Canyon Loop Trail, which is about six and a half miles. It was magnificent. Much of it runs along the San Leandro Reservoir. At the bottom it's kind of marshy swamp land, as a local river runs into the reservoir, which is pretty unlike other geography you find in the hills. There was also a near deafening chorus of frogs there. From there, you head up, and it's all very nicely wooded areas, but you regularly see the Reservoir off to the right.

I saw some people the first mile or two, but from there, the trail was all mine.

At the southernmost part of the trail, you get a beautiful view of Kings Canyon, which leads off to the Upper Reservoir. I enjoyed that for a while, before continuing on.

Out at the furthest edge of the loop, I came on one of the fire roads leading down to Laguna Rancho, which I could vaguely make out in the distance (or rather, I could make out some of the ostentatious houses near it, which I remembered from my last trip there). But from there I headed back. As usual, the EBMUD signage was horrible. I have no idea how I would have managed the loop without a hiking guide I found online, but with that I was able to pretty easily follow the paths as they went this way and that.

The hike back was the hardest because it went straight over a steep hill. There were some horses up near the top, though they looked sadly neglected. One came over and said "hi" to me for a while before he got bored and wandered off.

From there I dropped straight back down to the Valle Vista Staging Area. Which was good, because it was getting dark. There was one last car leaving the parking lot as I got there.

Great hike, overall. A very pretty area.

And my hiking shoes seem to be back in usable condition. I took them back to the shoe repair and they stretched the collars back a bit and softened them. Then because the shoes have always been a slight bit loose, I put some inserts in the back. And between those, I don't think I gave myself any new blisters from the walk (and certainly not the horrible abrasions from walking less than a mile that I'm still healing from after my first time out with the repaired shoes).

Mind you, I still had bandaids on the backs of my ankles, so that might have helped too, but that just means I need to drop some bandaids in my backpack.

(And I did have extra shoes that I carried the whole way around the loop, in case I had problems. But I think I'll be more trusting next time.)

Getting back from the Moraga area after dark is always a challenge. The last few times I did it, I took the Lafayette-Moraga Trail back, and that's always unpleasant because there are people walking in the pitch black that you have to avoid hitting.

This time, I took Moraga Way back to Orinda, and that's not pleasant either, because it's a fast, busy road with poor lighting. There is a bike lane the whole way, though at several places it gets uncomfortably narrow. I never exactly felt unsafe, but it was exhausting staying on high alert the whole time, so I don't think I'll do Moraga Way in the dark again.

Still, a good ride up and then down into Orinda.

One thing I'd still like to do in that area: the Rampage Peak hike which climbs all the way up to Antony Chabot Park from one of these EBMUD staging areas. (I'm not sure which; their maps are horrible.) The trick Is figuring out how to do that without ending up with a bike being the opposite side of the hill from where I end up. (Possibilities: a Lyft out to the trail head or a an early enough hike that I can round-trip, or maybe a Lyft down from Chabot back to the trail head.)

I have a long tradition of taking off the week from Christmas to New Year's. And, I try to keep myself busy.

Saturday (the 22nd). I headed out to Walnut Creek where I spent Christmas money on new jeans and a new flannel overshirt. (Exciting!) Then I biked the Iron Horse Trail from Walnut Creek to Pleasanton/Dublin. I always like getting out and about on my weekends, but it's a little harder in the winter when it's cold. So, bike rides are preferred then, and it's usually a little warmer that side of the hills because there's less overcast.

Sunday (the 23rd). We saw the Wizard of Oz.

Monday. Kimberly's foot is still recovering, so we weren't up for a BART ride down south, but Bob was kind enough to pick us up to attend this year's Wiedlin gatherings. Christmas Eve was as always a fun mix of family, games, and tasty food. The only downside was that the dogs have gone wild in the last year. For some reason, Joy got upset at us staying in the guest room at the end of the long west-east hall in the house, and so every time Kimberly or I stepped out its door, she started barking up a storm and got Hope involved too.

Tuesday. We began Christmas with a tasty breakfast, as usual. We waited longer than usual for Jason and Lisa, but that's because they have a new child. Kimberly and I met our first nephew, Julian. And he was mostly a lump, spending all his time nursing, sleeping, and having his nappies changed. But as Lisa said, he's in the potato stage. We had good Christmas presenting. I got great books, great games, a nice pull-over sweater, and other things. We played more games, had a good evening dinner, and then Rob was kind enough to drive us all the way back to Berkeley (at which point Kimberly and I had our own stockings and presents).

Wednesday. During the day I took my hiking shoes out to a shoe repair store, because I'd rubbed through the backs, unmasking the plastic pain devices under the fabric in the heel. But, the soles still have a lot of life, so repair was the answer. (Exciting!) Then, I went to the last night of Endgame board gaming.

Thursday. Definitely, my laziest day of the holiday. I lounged around the house reading and napping until dinner time, at which point I read a bit to Kimberly (we're still on Hawaii, but drawing near the end). Then, I had my friends over for a couple of games of Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Mummy's Mask.

Friday. We always see a movie around Christmas, and this year we chose Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse. We decided to see it down at Bay Street, and that caused problems because they've made the rather ill-considered decision to go over to reserved seats in their theatres. So (1) we couldn't properly reserve seats that would have accounted for Kimberly's scooter; (2) we had to reserve in advance and thus pay their $3.50 "convenience charge" to guarantee ourselves anything like good seats; and (3) we got to watch people call in the management to evict people from the seats they'd stolen as we were trying to watch previews. Good times. (Well, the previews sucked anyway: they were all either very religious or very kid-focused.) But the movie rocked. One of the best super-hero films I've ever seen. Not only did it have great and funny writing, not only did it to a great job with a whole host of Spider-men, but it also made excellent use of the animated form.

Saturday. For my last Saturday of the holiday, I came up with a great adventure: taking BART out to Pittsburg Central to explore Black Diamond Mines. The BART ride went one stop beyond the old Pittsburg Station, on the new "DMU" trains that have totally squandered the potential of BART in Eastern CoCoCo. You have to change trains at a special platform east of Pittsburg, and you hop into a teeny, lightweight car that feels like it's held together with paper clips and tinfoil. Despite claims that there would be space for bikes in the DMUs, neither one I got into had anywhere for bikes, so I had to stand there awkwardly, holding my bike for five minutes each way. From Pittsburg Center it was a five-mile bike ride to Contra Loma Reservoir, and from there I walked up into the Black Diamond Mines Regional Preserve, where I did a several-mile loop. It was mostly empty and there were some nice vistas, and I got to explore one of the "mines", a 400-foot tunnel that failed to find coal. I went about 100 feet in before I got too spooked by the possibility of rattlesnakes hanging out. Overall, it was a nice day, though I was home late.

Sunday. We completed our trilogy of media when we saw Arcadia.

Monday. And I ended my holiday with a gaming day out in Eastern CoCoCo with two Erics. In recent years, I've done more biking and hiking during the holidays, but gaming may be something I'm missing in Kauai. So, we played Near and Far, Thunderstone, and Ghost Stories to end out the year. Then I came home on BART, feverishly finished my year-end RPG review and Kimberly and I drank some Martinelli's to mark our penultimate year in the Bay Area.

Labor Day weekend!

Getting to the Point. On Saturday, I biked up to Point Richmond, mainly because that was the direction of the closest cheap-o shoe store nowadays. But Point Richmond was a great destination in that area because I love the beach out at Ferry Point and the Knox-Miller Shoreline and the hills above them. (I partook of both the hills and the shoreline over the course of the day and did indeed find some shoes in Richmond on the way home.)

He Likes It! Hey, Bikey! Much to my surprise, as I turned onto the western half of the Richmond Greenway (after the regular annoying trip through downtown Richmond, because over a decade later, Richmond still hasn't connected the two halves of the path), I found the Greenway jammed with people. They've created a couple of BMX courses of hills curves and such right next to the Greenway there, and Saturday was its grand opening. It was great seeing kids and adults alike flying through the course, sometimes literally. I stopped for a while and watched, then did the same thing on the way back. I kept expecting to see TJ Lavin. It's lovely to see that western half of the Greenway increasingly used by the community, and it was surprising to see the whole Greenway clean, though that was probably a one-time-only grand-opening thing.

The Quest for the Perfect Chicken Sandwich. For lunch on Saturday I chose a place called Great American Hamburger in Point Richmond, which looked like an old-school hamburger joint. I idly hoped that it might be comparable to our dearly-departed Oscar's ... and I was pleasantly surprised. Oh, it was too small and crowded. (Next time the chicken sandwich goes with me to the park.) And, their fries were totally mediocre. But their chicken sandwich was almost perfect, by Oscar's standards. It was cut just a tiny bit too thick, which made little bits of it too dry, but for the most part it was delicious, and the condiments were a combination of lettuce, tomato, big cuts of onion, and watery mayo that tasted like it came straight from Oscar's. I was in heaven, savoring every bite. I'll definitely be returning.

A Trip to the Middle East. My dad and Mary are in the Bay Area for their annual visit, so on Sunday we got to see them, along with Melody and Jared of course. It was a nice afternoon, and we walked up to La Med for a late lunch. (My dad said they have no similar middle-eastern restaurants on the island which will soon be our problem too.) As usual, it was great seeing everyone.

Foxfoxfox. And then today after lunch with K., I hiked all the way up to the top of the hills behind our house, with the intent of getting some exercise, some (overly cool) sunshine, and some work done on my ongoing Designers & Dragons updates for the German edition. While I was up working on the bench just over the ridgeline, looking down into the Siesta Valley, a grey fox wandered by! I think he hadn't noticed me because I was working quietly, but when he did see me he was more interested than anything. He walked a bit, then watched, then walked a bit more, and stared at me for quite a while as he stood just above the drop that would take him out of sight. I took some pictures, and he only fled when I talked to him. Cute fox! I've never seen one in the wild before.

And tomorrow it's back to work, but the best thing about a three-day weekend is that you start the workweek and it's already Tuesday!

Today, Berkeley was forecast to be in the high 60s and eastern Contra Coast was forecast to be in the low 80s. I choose the latter.

The plan was a bike ride with some hiking. I hopped off BART at Pleasant Hill and looped up on the Western Contra Costa Canal Trail. That's my canal trail less traveled, but it's lovely. Quieter than either the Iron Horse Trail or the Eastern CoCoCa Trail. Mostly shaded. And running alongside a beautiful canal.

I don't think I've ever made it to the end of the Western CoCoCa Trail, and I didn't today either. Instead I hared off west less than a mile from where it dead-ends at Highway 4, the death of all good trails that side of the hills. My objective was Hidden Lakes and/or Hidden Valley Park, just over the border into Martinez. It looks great on the maps, because it's a hidden little set of lakes and streams that's got entries from all the nearby neighborhoods. I imagined a beautiful pocket of greenery. The reality turned out to be poorly maintained trails rambling all over through barren, brown hills. I guess it's kinda cool for the neighborhood, but not particularly amazing. Up on one side there was a real park, with playground and picnic tables and such. I sat there for a bit, had some chocolate, wrote a bit, and hoped I didn't look like a creeper so near the kid's playground.

From there I was planning to head out to the Carquinez Strait Regional Shoreline, a park that I'd been planning to hike, but as it turned out, I stubbornly refused to hike throughout the day. My first hiking refusal was at a long branch of the California Riding & Hiking Trail that led to an entrance to the park. It had been marked as a bike trail, but it was totally unbikable, and really didn't look that nice of a walk either. I actually hiked up a quarter of a mile or so, but decided that I didn't love it, and it'd probably prevent me from getting all the way up to the Carquinez Strait like I wanted.

So it was biking onward, down into Martinez. Soon, I arrived at the Mount Wanda Trailhead, but I biked by that too because the hills looked so hot and high. I tried one more time at a mid-park entrance, bit it looked hot and high too, and by that point I decided I probably wasn't hiking up in those hills in mid-80 degree heat. Besides, I was really enjoying the small-town feel of Martinez as I biked through it.

So instead I decided to do things by the Strait itself, as I utilizing the improved mobility of my bike.

The Radke Martinez Regional Shoreline Park was probably the prettiest thing I saw on my trip. It's right on the Strait, and at that point the Strait curves, so it feels almost like you're looking at a lake, because there's land on almost all sides. It felt like a pretty little nature preserve, and I could see why people in the area would love to go there.

Heading eastward I left the prettier historic area of Martinez and headed into what was once unincorporated Mococo, and which is still ugly refinery-filled areas. I've never seen so many pipes crossing the road. ("To get to the other side.")

Then it was across the Benicia-Martinez Bridge. This is a new bike and pedestrian path, built in 2009. (I was surprised to see it was that long ago.) I thus had high expectations. But it was a plain two-directional bike path, with traffic going by too near, at maybe 6-10 feet away. Still, unlike with the Bay Bridge, they put the bike path on the correct side, so that you can see across that fun curve of the Strait to the Carquinez Bridge. I kept my eyes on that view most of the way across. It was another very pretty bit of the trip. Fortunately(?) there were absolutely no other pedestrians or bicyclists on the bridge (either way), so my distraction didn't matter.

Much as the one day I went to Vallejo, I felt like there wasn't much of interest once I got across the bridge. In both cases that's in part because you're still right on the highway when you get across the bridge. But this time I was able to circle down into the nearby town, which is Benicia.

Benicia is a weird little town that doesn't seem to know what it is. I locked up my bike and walked several blocks to get a cold Slurpee and I walked through a variety of neighborhoods. First up was a street that looked like it was straight out of 1956, with carefully manicured classic houses, with front porches that people sat on and talked. And then there was a trailer park. And then condos that were trying to look like 1950s houses. Then ugly, cheap houses. It was a weird mix. Perhaps I would have found more of interest if I'd been willing to walk down to the Strait, but the town was all on a hillside, and I was already pretty tired, so I just circled to the 7-11 and back.

It was somewhere around 10 miles from Benicia to the Concord BART. Not particularly great riding either. I was quite tired by this point, and when I cut through eastern Martinez, it was another refinery hellscape. Then I ended up on the very busy Concord Ave, which had no bike lane or shoulder and fast, heavy traffic. Meanwhile, I felt like I was constantly dodging highways, as 4, 680, and 242 are all in that area. So it goes. I passed right over the Iron Horse Trail on the way, and was tempted to turn south. It would have been a more pleasant trip, but I wasn't willing to add another 5 or so miles to the trip when it was already past 5pm, and I was by now bone-tired.

Eventually, I made it to BART.

It was great seeing some cities that I'd never biked before, in Martinez, Benicia, and the unincorporated Pacheco. The Carquinez Strait Regional Shoreline looked like a nice hilly hike, I just need to choose a cooler day, perhaps something in February or March when the hills might actually be green. My bike computer disintegrated in Martinez, something that'd been a while coming as it was already held together by superglue (and only half-worked), so I'm not sure of my biking mileage. It was 16 miles when last I looked at it, at one of my failed entries to the Carquinez Straight Regional Shoreline, and Google Maps says that I did at least 17 miles after that. So maybe 35 miles in Eastern Contra Costa County. Add getting to and from BART this side of the hills, and I probably posted a 40-mile day on my bike, which is the best I've done since my urologist got me hiking two and a half years ago. And my Fitbit says I'm a few minutes short of 400 active minutes for the day (six and two-thirds hours). So no wondered I was so tired heading back to Concord BART.

Oh, and I covered some new Bay Trail, something I haven't done in years. My main roads through Martinez, the bridge crossing, and my partial trip down into Benicia were all Bay Trail. (Doing the loop between the two bridges on the Carquinez Strait would give me even more, and would connect me to my long set of Bay Trail trips from Fremont to Crockett, but I've never quite felt up to that, and the vast majority of it is actually unfinished at this point, just like it was a decade ago when I was riding the Bay Trail more consistently.)

Edit: Actually it looks like I biked a little new Bay Trail the day a few months ago when I was out on Treasure Island and before that when I rode the new paths at Point Pinole last year, but that's all either new Bay Trail or newly accessible Bay Trail.

Anywho, an adventuresome day out.

I haven't bicycled as much these last few years. The original reason was my urologist suggesting I lay off it for a while. That never turned out to be relevant, but in the meantime I got into hiking.

But then Friday night, K. was looking for some adventure to celebrate her new ability to walk around in a boot. And after much looking at local parks and bus schedules and such we finally came to the conclusion that Richmond Inner Harbor would be a nice trip for her on Saturday, because it was accessible in about 45 minutes from our house and has a nice central green.

Meanwhile, this got me excited about all the areas along the Bay that I hadn't seen in a while, so I decided to bike on my own on Saturday from the Berkeley Marina to ... however far north I got, while K. took her more public-transit-oriented adventure.

The heart of my day's adventure was a ramble out along the Albany Bulb, which I haven't visited in some years, since back when it used to be a derelict junkyard heavily inhabited by the homeless. But now, since Albany paid all of the homeless to move on (to Berkeley, of course), it's become part of the Eastshore Regional Park, so I wanted to see how it had changed.

The answer is: all for the better. The park is now well-used and not eerie-empty (or scary-homeless) like it was before, but it still retains all of its industrial and artistic charm.

Along the south shore there was a lot of concrete everywhere, which is what industries used to dump here, and lots of it was painted in various different ways. On the north shore instead there was wacky sculpture made out of various bits of wood and who knows what else. Some of it was really beautiful. And, out at the west, the rocks that encircle the lagoon at the end of the bulb were entirely traversable, albeit with some jumping from rock to rock and hoping I didn't end up in the water.

It was all around a neat experience.

After that, I ended up in the Richmond Harbor where I did a bit more than an hour's writing. I've been missing my 2 D&D histories a week schedule lately, but at least I got one done (and a new Mechanics & Meeple for the week) while sitting out at the ever-beautiful Harbor.

Ironically (and sadly) K. didn't make it out to the Inner Harbor. She hurt her foot from too much walking in her shoe, and ended up spending the entire weekend couchbound. (We made a scooter-assisted trip to dinner on Sunday night).

On the way home I took the Richmond Greenway to the Ohlone Greenway.

Sadly, the Richmond Greenway has continued to deteriorate. This seems to be Richmond's attitude toward pathways like this: get the money to work on them, fail to finish them, damage usage by the lack of connectivity, and then let them rot. So, the Richmond Greenway has always been troubled by trash, but this time it was filled with it at various points.

There were two points of light:

First, there's a various nice playground that's been constructed on the western half of the Greenway. It had lots of nice wooden play equipment and also a wooden pavilion with some tables. It was well-used (and about the only place on the Richmond Greenway being used).

Second, Richmond closed one of the Greenway's troublesome gaps: the connection to the Ohlone Greenway. It's not the bridge soaring over San Pablo that was promised a decade ago, nor is it the nice creekside path promised five years ago. But it is a path that runs to straight to across the road from the Ohlone Greenway and has a HAWK light that turns almost immediately when you get there, allowing easy transit. So, yay.

(The gap in the middle of the Richmond Greenway remains one of the five worst bicycling gaps in the Bay Area; if Richmond doesn't fix it, the Greenway will one day end up an abandoned wasteland like the WIldcat Creek Trail to the north, which literally lies in three disconnected segments and looks like a post-apocalyptic landscape as a result.)

Anywho, from there it was a nice ride up the Ohlone Greenway, which is kept very clean, and has improved waysigns throughout Albany.

When the pedestrian path on the Bay Bridge opened in September 2013, I was one of the first people to bike it. That day, I went all the way to the end and stared at the drop into space beyond, because they hadn't managed to get it to Yerba Buena Island, due to the old Bay Bridge being in the way.

By the time they finally completed the path, over three years later, I'd lost a lot of my enthusiasm for Biking the Bridge. That's partly because I was by then hiking more than biking, but also because Caltrans was playing stupid games with closing it down every other week throughout 2017. So, it was hard to schedule. (In fact, as far as I can tell, Caltrans is now still violating their agreement to keep the path open 24x7, which they agreed to after much pressure from pedestrian and bicycling groups, back before the new bridge opened.)

But this Friday, I had bonus weekend time, because I took the day off after a week and a half of unrelenting work. So I decided to bike out to Yerba Buena Island and Treasure Island at last.

I haven't biked the bridge in a long time. It's a challenge because it's a long uphill. And windy. And loud. But it's always rewarding to see the Bay opening up around you (though, sadly, they put the path on the wrong side of the bridge; you would have been able to see much more beautiful vistas on the north than on the south.)

I was quite pleased to pass the center of the actual suspension bridge, because that's about where the path ended before. Soon I was on a slight decline that pulled away from the bridge itself and dropped to Yerba Buena Island.

Yerba Buena Island, it turns out, is a mess.

There's nonetheless a nice little vista just to the left on Yerba Buena Island. Well, kinda nice. It's just a patio and a little lawn below, with lots of fences all around, partially blocking the views. But, there are some vistas. And benches at both levels. And water and a bathroom. So I sat there, ate the lunch I'd picked up from Togo's, and then did some writing. (I've gotten behind on my two histories per week that I should be working on to someday come out with my sequel to Designers & Dragons.)

But, there are also closed roads all over the Island and construction everywhere. And finally, there are still government-controlled areas that are closed off. The result is pretty ugly and makes it very hard to see anything or to get around the island.

The path from Yerba Buena Island to Treasure Island goes around the back side of the island (toward San Francisco). It had a little bit of uphill, but not too much. And, because of all the construction and closures, the traffic in the direction of Alcatraz Island from the pedestrian pathway is almost exclusively for bikes and pedestrians). So, it was a petty low-key trip out there and pretty safe. And then it was down, down, down to Treasure Island, which is an artificial island, and thus just barely above sea level.

Treasure Island, it turns out, is even more of a mess than Yerba Buena Island. A lot of the roads are partially or entirely closed. Surprisingly, there are still some people living on the island, and some businesses, but a lot more looks closed up, and there's a lot of construction too.

I enjoyed seeing the two sides of the Bay Bridge from below, and I appreciated exploring the time-lost streets (which reminded me of the abandoned houses in the north of Alameda island) and seeing the East Bay in the distance. But, I was underwhelmed until I got to the north edge of the island, (which turns out to be further away than I expected; it's a pretty long island). But you get toward the north edge, and there you find an entrance to the perimeter path, which goes all around the end of the island. From there you have beautiful views of Angel Island, Marin, Alcatraz, the Golden Gate, and of course San Francisco. Being out in the Bay, a lot of it feels very close-up as well. It made the trip entirely worthwhile.

Afterward I rode back up to Yerba Buena Island. That was the most challenging part of the ride, because I had to reclaim the 200 feet to get back to the Bay Bridge deck in a relatively short amount of time, but I managed it without either stopping or feeling like I was dying, so go me. However, it was still the least pleasant part of the ride because you have to play chicken with the eastbound entrance to the Bay Bridge. Yep, they really need to fix that.

So, I'm pleased that I got out to see the islands, but they're clearly very much a work-in-progress. They need to fix the wreck of roads on Yerba Buena, and Treasure Island needs to be put back together. But after that, it should be a pretty kick-ass destination.

Sometime long after we've left the Bay Area.

One amusing interlude Friday night: K. asked me to pick up dinner at Taco Bell after I got home. So I went to the Taco Bell a block away from campus and found it absolutely jammed with students, two or three times as busy as I've ever seen it before. Every table filled, every stool filled. There were backlogged by ten orders, which is entirely unknown there (but they still knocked the orders out blindingly fast; it's one of the best Taco Bells I've ever been to, and that's saying something).

I had no idea what was going on, so I just sat there puzzled at the time.

Turns out that a big 4/20 demonstration had just ended on campus, where the students all stood around in front of the "No Smoking" signs that fill campus ... and smoked (pot).

And the students were all really hungry afterward, for no apparent reason, so it was off to Taco Bell.

The ride on Friday was somewhere around 25 miles. Then today I hiked 14 miles, from Jewel Lake at the north side of Tilden, back home, along any number of Tilden trails and fire trails.

So, a busy and healthy two days. And I've managed to put eleven days of work and stress out of my head just a bit.

And then we spent Saturday evening at the ER, because K. had a bad fall on her scooter while I was up in the hills, and we were both concerned that she might have broken her thumb.

I was shocked to see that the Alta Bates ER now has a metal detector at their door. File that under reason #32,102 that I'm happy to be leaving the East Bay.

However, it's one of the most ineffective security setups I've ever seen. You just pass your bags around it, and they don't check them at all. So, you just put the guns in your bags, not in your pants.

As for the thumb: two sets of x-rays, one CAT scan, and six hours later, they decided it wasn't broken. After being pretty sure that it was.

Just badly bruised and maybe sprained.

K. now has an immobilized thumb to go with her broken foot.

January has mostly slipped away. For me it's been routine. (Not so much for the wife.) I've back to work. I've been hiking on Saturdays, but nothing new and exciting. We managed to get our first Saturday game in since September, with a Microscope session to kick off our this year's Clockwork Campaign. I've been gaming on Wednesdys and Thursdays. I've mostly homebodied on Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays because it's cold outside and K. has a broken foot. We ventured out one Sunday to get yogurt and write on campus, but found that Yogurtland went out of business in October.

And so life goes on.

But today I came up with a slightly more exciting day out that wasn't just a walk to Tilden or Orinda. I went up to San Pablo to have a delicious shrimp lunch at Popeyes, then I biked through San Pablo (and El Sobrante) and down San Pablo Dam Road to the San Pablo Reservoir.

Lots of San Pablo going on.

There was more excitement than I expected in El Sobrante. That's because protesters were out blowing whistles and holding signs that said, "No Richmond Methadone Clinics in El Sobrante." When I saw them as I biked through I said, "Yay!" And that made people perk up and smile. But those smiles didn't know what to do with themselves when I started chanting "Heroin Users Die! Heroin Users Die! No Sympathy for the Sick! Heroin Users Die!"

Which is pretty much what they were saying too, but were too cowardly to admit.

Now, I could understand if people didn't want a methadone clinic in their residential area. I wouldn't either. But this is a methadone clinic going into an ugly cement block building next to another cement block building across an overly-large, over-busy, overly-fast street from an endless row of dying strip malls. It's practically the definition of where a methadone clinic should go.

But what really pissed me off was the coded racism of the protest. They weren't just protesting a methadone clinic, they were explicitly protesting a *Richmond* methadone clinic. That's a city that is majority black and hispanic. And if there was any doubt about the coded racism, the blinding white pallor of the protestors made it obvious. El Sobrante is 60% white; the protest was about 96%.

I lost my cool by the time I hit the third or fourth group of protestors and one called out to me specifically. I told her, "F*** your lack of compassion."

El Sobrante is Trump's America.

Funny story: Richmond is a really weirdly shaped city. It totally encloses the town of San Pablo with a strip of land to the east that's just one or two hundred feet wide that runs from the Hilltop Mall area in the north to the Alvarado Park area in the south. The planned methadone clinic is in that strip of land, not in San Pablo (to the west), not in El Sobrante (to the east), but IN RICHMOND. In other words, they're keeping their dirty Richmond methadone clinic IN RICHMOND.

I parked my bike at the Eagle's Nest Trail between the San Pablo Reservoir and Tilden.

I walked into the Reservoir area, then northward. Theoretically I was following Old San Pablo Dam Trail but it disappeared as soon as I got into the Reservoir area. This is typical for EBMUD. Still, I walked what might or might not have been a proper trail right along the wasterside. It was a beautiful trail with trees all along and the Reservoir to my right.

I walked a bit more than a mile to get to the entrance to Kennedy Grove. I've been there a few times, but just at their picnic tables and greens. I did sit at a table for a while and write. But then I decided to explore a bit more of the park. It's not very large, but it does have several miles of trail. I did a big loop around the southernmost trails, about 3 miles total. It was more trail with lots of nice trees. It climbed a few hundred feet up a hill and gave me awesome views of the Reservoir and other lands that side of the hills.

I was amused that two different people on the trail asked me if I knew how much further the top was. I usually don't get that on the trails. But maybe Kennedy Grove attracts less experienced hikers.

Then it was back through the Reservoir to my bike then up to Orinda then back home via BART.

Plans for another hike: get up to Inspiration Point, take the the Inspiration Trail down to the Reservoir, walk north at the Reservoir to the Eagle's Nest Trail, then hike back up that. And that'll complete my trails at the Reservoir, since I'd previously gone south from Inspiration Point to Orinda and have now gone north from Eagle's Nest Trail to Kennedy Grove.

I have 649 days left on my EBMUD Trail pass.

(May Trump have fewer days left in his presidency.)

I was happy to do so much biking. I haven't been doing much of that lately, but in the last few days I've been overcome by the thoughts of open roads, of community floating by on either side (sadly, including racist protestors) and trails that go on forever. The trip from San Pablo to Orinda is definitely hard work at times. My Fitbit tells me that I got into the cardio zone for 65% of my ride from San Pablo to the Reservoir, then 75% of my ride from the Reservoir to Orinda. Good stuff! And tiring!

I guess I have two years to maximize my biking shape, because there just won't be as much biking exercise in Hawaii.

It's been almost a month since I got back from Berlin. If the lack of journal entries isn't a clue, I was tired when I got back. I've been doing well at work, in large part because I've had a very busy schedule that is just now lightening up. But in my after hours I've been mostly laid back. I wrote a few Mechanics & Meeples last week, and I've been slowly muddling around with TSR product histories, but mostly I've been reading.

And on weekends, getting out.

Thursday, Christopher brought me a newspaper article on Carr Valley, a 600-acre former cattle raunch southeast of Moraga that was purchased by EBMUD last year. It officially opened to the public on November 11th (or at least to EBMUD's extremely limited definition of the public), and Christopher thought that I'd enjoy seeing a natural area that was still almost virgin. He was totally right.

The Carr Valley is right in the middle of a bunch of other EBMUD lands, pretty much filling in a big gap. As such, it's a bit challenging to get to. It takes about an hour to get to the Valley along EBMUD's secret trails, leaving from Rancho Laguna Park. You walk the Rocky Ridge Trail east, alongside a nice creek, then up a relatively steep ridgeline, then you drop down to the canyon on the other side. Across another creek there's now a new path that leads into Carr Valley.

To a large extent, I've seen lands just like Carr Valley before. Part of it is (another) nice creekside trail, part of it is hillside, and part it runs along the ridge at the back of the valley. But, I always enjoy getting to explore somewhere new, and so even if the terrains were familar, the experience wasn't. And there were quite a few exhilarating views, of the beautiful valley, of the hills surrounding it, and of the lands eastward.

The wide paths were clean and well-cut, though oddly enough they were the greenest areas in the valley. Much of the brush is still brown up there, since we're just on the edge of our rainy season, but the paths often had a light covering of grass. In fact, when you saw the trails from afar, they were green pathways, snaking up and down the hillsides.

I was surprised to not see much wildlife. I thought that with the land being so untouched, animals would be everywhere, but perhaps they were more afraid of humanity for that same reason. I did see one squirrel, who looked pretty shocked to see a human in his domain, and dozens of cows, a common feature in EBMUD lands.

And there were almost no peoples. I saw two heading back up the trail when I went in. It was between 1 and 2 o'clock at the time, I thought how much smarter they were than I, because I knew I'd be fighting the sun to get back out of the park by dusk. But then when I saw a couple heading into the Valley at 3.45 or so, just when I emerged, I thought better of myself. (There's no way they weren't walking those trails out in the dark, unless they turned right around; as was I saw the sun set twice on my way back out, once before I climbed out of that canyon outside the valley, and once afterward.)

Overall, a few pleasant experience. (Thanks, Chris!) I've been meaning to explore more of the EBMUD South paths, and this gave me an excuse. (Last Christmas vacation, I'd planned a walk on an adjoining path, beginning at St. Mary's College, but I decided it was too cold.) I've got two years left on my EBMUD permit, though I think I long ago got my $30 worth out of it.

With that said, it was a challenging trip. I left the house at 10am, which is the earliest I can go and get a sandwich at Cheese 'n Stuff. I got back at 6.15, an hour after dark. That's because to get there I had to bike to Rockridge BART, take BART to Lafayette, ride the Lafayette-Moraga trail to almost the end, and then bike southeast a ways beyond that. (Obviously, the return was the reverse.)

I was out and active the whole time, with just the exceptions of waiting for BART, sitting on BART, and having my lunch. I totaled 36,000 steps and 323 flights of stairs on my Fitbit, both outstanding numbers (though that includes some of the biking).

When I was biking up the Lafayette-Moraga trail, I was a bit worried if I could still do that sort of hill. (It's not super steep, but there's a lot of it.) Last time I was out there, I barely noticed the hills, but the last two years I've been doing less biking, and almost no hill biking, preferring hiking instead.

But, the biking turned out to be OK, with me only getting a little tuckered at a very steep bit just before the top of the hill.

The one problem with the Lafayette-Moraga trail is that it's still partially closed.

I'd actually seen that the last mile of it was bloccked off on my visit to Moraga 11 months ago, but I thought: there's no way it's still closed.

Ha!

And after almost a year (maybe more), the East Bay Regional Park District still hasn't offered any reasonable detour for their one and only major thoroughfare down to Moraga. They dump you out into a neighborhood with no notice, and there's no way out of the neighborhood (unless you backtrack). I spent 15 or 20 minutes riding down dead-end streets before I finally hopped back on the Lafayette-Moraga trail and rode back to the previous street.

The ride home was great. Almost all downhill. The downhill on the Lafayette-Moraga trail heading toward Lafayette BART is especially fun. It was a little darker than I like, but on the other hand the path was much more empty of people as a result.

Monday night, I decided to bike up to Lake Temescal after work.

It was a very regular destination for me a couple of years ago, some place that I'd often visit on the weekends and in evenings, but it fell off my itinerary early last year when my doctor (pointlessly) asked me not to bike for a while.

So, I think I only went there once in 2016, when I hiked through it, up to Sibley Volcanic Regional Park. And I don't think that I've ever ridden my "new" bike up there.

My purpose was to go and see some new biking infrastructure. There's now a "cycle track" where Broadway takes the turn toward Temescal at Keith. This is a two-way protected bike path off to right side of the road (as you go uphill). I have to admit, I was confused by the usefulness of a cycle track that's just a block long, but it gets you around a tight corner and it gets you past the area where cars are merging onto 24. So, it's actually a nice bit of safe riding that gets you past the hurly-burly. (You still have to deal with cars merging off of 24 on Keith, but I've never had any particular problem with them.)

Past that one cycle track block there are now marked bike lanes all the way up to Temescal (and if Google Maps is to be believed, all the way up to the North Oakland Regional Sports Center). This is nice too, as I'd ridden that road many a time and found it slightly uncomfortable with the cars whizzing by on the previously unmarked road.

It's all about a year and a half late if I remember correctly which year this was promised (2015?), but definitely a nice addition to the local infrastructure.

Now if we could just get the promised improvements done to Tunnel Road, on the other side of 24. That's coming up on eight years late, and I can't even get Berkeley to update their two-year-out-of-date Highway 13 Corridor Improvements Project page despite two different polite requests.

One of the things that shocked me about the bike lanes up Upper Broadway is that they've totally replaced all on-street parking. Mind you, the on-street parking was totally irrelevant. It's only use was up by Lake Temescal, for people who refused to pay the parking fee in the big lot at the park. But the City apparently decided that it was more important for bikes to have a safe route on the street than for cars to have unnecessary parking ... which is really a sea change. (And something that needs to occur more often: roads are primarily for transit, not for parking, and if the two come into contention, transit needs to win.)

Of course, we'll see how that actually works out on a warm summer day. I'm actually thinking about heading back in this direction on Saturday, which should offer a prime look at whether it's yet another place where Oakland talks a good talk, but then doesn't enforce it when cars block the bike lanes. (Their regularly blocked "protected" bike lanes on Telegraph are the best example currently of Oakland's lacsadasical attitude toward enforcement.)

I was also surprised that the ride up to Lake Temescal was pretty easy. That used to be a hard hill. But maybe I was so focused on keeping pressure off my wounded knee that I didn't notice the huffing and puffing.

I was really pleased when I got up to Temescal. It was like seeing an old friend again. I hiked halfway around the lake, tossed my computer done and wrote and edited for a while, then hiked back to retrieve my bike.

The lake seemed more crowded than I remembered in evenings. Quite a few people out at picnic tables talking and eating and hanging. Much more than the handful of fishermen, joggers, and dog walkers that I used to see. Dunno if it marks a change in the last year and a half or just a busy evening.

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Entries tagged with biking

Fast & Flurrious

Three Saturdays and a Flight

Biking Koloa

Life in these Hawaiian States

In Which I Bike from Richmond to San Francisco

In Which Time Dilates

In Which I Bike the Bridge One More Time, as Days Count Down

In Which I Visit Coyote Hills & Point Richmond

In which I Ride Roads & Walk Streets

In Which I Enjoy a Memorial Day Weekend in the Suburbs

In Which I Try to Burn Away My Stress

In Which I Explore Valle Vista

In Which I Holiday

In Which I See Bikes, Burgers, Family, and a Fox

In Which I Travel to Benicia

In Which I Return to the Albany Bulb

In Which I Explore Treasure Island; and Go to the ER

In Which I See Protesters & Other Dammed Things

In Which I Explore Carr Valley

In Which I Return to Lake Temescal