shannon_a | Entries tagged with san jose

THE HAGUE, DAY -1

This was my day to hang out with my mom and Bob on my trip through San Jose. I pretty much needed to stop somewhere to avoid sleeping two nights on planes (or rather failing to do so), and San Jose seemed like the prime choice because I could spend an extra day here seeing the folks. (It was too brief, I would have liked to stay a day or two more, but this trip is already longer than I like at 12 days.)

I woke up to a nice breakfast of scrambled eggs and biscuit. Since I never eat breakfast, that was a really nice treat.

Then I met the new goats. Three of them. Very cute, but also pretty skittish around other people (e.g., me).

Then the main event of the day was a bike ride. My mom and Bob have recently gotten e-bikes, so we took those up the Coyote Creek Trail that runs from San Martin to San Jose. When I lived in the East Bay, I'd dreamed of biking down from BART to San Martin, but it depended on BART getting to Berryessa, and that was delayed by more than a year, until after our move, so it never happened. Which made this a nice treat (though I'd ridden a little of the trail with Bob some years previous).

Anyway, we biked 10 miles up the Creek, turned around, and went back. That's about two-thirds of the full trail. I was shocked to learn that we'd actually been up in San Jose when we turned around, so I guess I kinda succeeded at the goal of biking from San Jose to San Martin.

The ride was beautiful. The type of scenario that I fondly remember from California. Brown hills, babbling creeks, green trees, scrub, suburbs. It was also just a bit chill the whole time. I told my mom it was the coolest bike ride I'd likely had in 2.5 years (though I took my bike up to Koke'e once, up to 3500 feet, so maybe not, but I remember that being a pretty hot ride, though much of that was heavy exertion on the rocky, hilly paths).

I rode one of the ebikes. It was pretty terrific. A really smooth ride. I rode it without petal assist out to San Jose, and then I put it on the lowest really operable level of petal assist ("2" out of 5) for the ride back. The petal assist was a notable help, especially on hills. I would have loved something like that when I biked the hills above Berkeley, which was always about as much as I could do. But the ebikes are just really taking off now (not years ago).

Afterward we had some Mexican dinner at a restaurant (in the outside area of course), which was a nice tostada salad for me (and without the green peppers and melted cheese that they tend to put on in Hawaii), and then we played a game of Azul, which I brought mainly because I had plenty of space in my suitcase. (There were also some smaller games that we didn't play, but no worries, I was happy to have some variety.) My mom won that!

We finished off the day watching the last half of the first episode of Lost in Space, which I liked much more than I expected because of its scientific foundation, its likable characters, and the character revelations of the last few minutes. Hoping to watch more back in Kauai once we finish our current shows (The Sandman and Doctor Who).

Altogether, a very nice day. I'm glad I thought to pause for a full day here.

Tomorrow: a very long plane ride.

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.)

Yesterday was the fourth of July, and though I'm not a big fan of mindlessly habitual patriotism, I do like punctuating my year, so when Donald and Mary invited me down to a BBQ before their regular alternate-saturday gaming, I opted to take them up on it.

And, we had a nice BBQ. Donald and Mary were there (of course) and their housemate Guy and Kevin, Chris, and Corina. And Chris Jr. It was fun hanging around with everyone in a non-gaming environment and just talking and relaxing. There were also delicious BBQ foods, including chicken and sausages and corn-on-the-cob, plus potato salad and a cookie.

A nice afternoon.

Of course getting down to San Jose was a challenge (and to be honest part of the reason that I decided to go down there). It's at the end of the BART line and Donald & Mary's house is about 20 miles beyond that. So I left at 9.30 in the morning to get there at 1 and I left the party just before 4 to get home by 8.

That of course meant biking. I totaled 48 miles for the day, which I think is the most I've ever biked in a day. My butt was really dragging for the last 8 miles or so, but I used to get exhausted after 30 miles, so getting exhausted every 40 miles is a huge improvement.

I was really tired as I pulled into Fremont (which is still several miles south of the Fremont BART station), so I made an emergency stop at a 76 Gas Station for a coca-cola Icee. First time I can remember having an Icee in years ... maybe decades. Oh, it was good in the hot south bay weather after much exercise though.

I rode down to San Jose fairly near the hills, and then I looped back up to Fremont (after the party) via the Guadalupe River. Along the way I touched upon all the trails and paths I could. There wasn't much that really impressed me, but there was some nice trails.

Lake Elizabeth is a pleasant little park just south of the Fremont BART station. I've seen it passing in cars many a time, but if I have ever visited it before, it was decades ago. It's got a nice lake in the middle and a lot of less-nice scrub around that. There are walking paths and picnic areas and even a water-slide. It struck me as a little less-cared for than I like and a little too suburban (mainly because huge parts of the park seemed to be taken up by miles of parking). But I might like it better if I visited it more. As it was, it was a nice way to travel through a mile or two of Fremont without having to ride the streets.

Railroad Avenue is a mysterious several blocks of off-road trail just past Lake Elizabeth. It run behind some condos. It also has a bridge over the major road there, which would be a great way to get to the Lake if it weren't just scrub at that point. I think perhaps this is part of an off-road trail that's mean to run all the way to the Fremont BART station eventually, but if so there's not much attention being given to it. Fremont generally seems to suck for their off-road trail work.

Hetchy Hetchy Trail is a little trail that starts just south of the Fremont border and mainly serves to connect together a couple of parks. It actually had a northern spur that I skipped because there's no way to get to it from the north! You have to go to the midpoint of the trail, and then go back. Sadly, that's the type of trail that people used to build, before they considered them for possible commute use. Even sadder, there's a clear space running through Fremont (presumably an old rail line) that the trail could continue on for many, many miles north, but ... Fremont.

Berryessa Creek Trail touches the south end of the Hetchy Hetchy Trail in Milpitas (or at least the south end of the park that the Hetchy Hetchy Trail peters out in). It is, I think, the worst trail that I've ever seen. All of the asphalt is cracked with waist-high weeds growing throughout. It's right next to a "creek" which is entirely enclosed in cement banks and which is filled with algae and weeds. Yuck.

Penitencia Creek Trail is the path I wanted to see because it runs behind the condos that my dad lived in many years ago, and I used to play on the trail when I was young. Sadly, it's not impressive. The eastern part runs through a park that I'm pretty sure wasn't there when I was young, but it was mostly scrub. The trail that I remember by the condos has a really nice part right next to the condos with lovely foliage (but you can't see the creek), then it ducks under the highway (just like I remember, but it's much lower than I would have guessed) and a few hundred feet past that it mostly peters out as it runs alongside some houses. It certainly seemed longer when I was young. Maybe the houses weren't there? I also could have sworn the path ran on the opposite side of the creek that it actually does, but I can probably attribute that to my crossing the creek and playing on the other side when I was young (and I now remember crossing on stones in the creek, but that may be confabulation). There's a second park on the opposite side of the trail, and it's nicer, with more greenery ... though its lake is totally dried up. Yikes!

Guadalupe River Trail is a rather magnificent trail that runs all the way from the Bay down to downtown San Jose. It's also a great commute trail, because it has underpasses that drop under every road you get to, meaning that you can go for miles and miles without stopping (except when rain floods those underpasses!). It was really nice where I got on, in downtown, but at some point I had to cross from the west bank to the east bank, and that wasn't as pleasant. The trail was on top of a big embankment (to keep those flood waters out), which means you got less river and more wind. Also: you see the backs of big industrial buildings to the east, most of which had nasty signs telling you they'd shoot you and feed you to the pigs if you dared to look at their property too long. Still, a pleasant ride.

Coyote Creek Trail could be the next big thing, but right now it's a big mess. Another Hetchy Hetchy Trail, which is supposed to connect Guadalupe and Coyote doesn't quite do so (so it was surface streets, past miles and miles of Cisco buildings) and then part of Coyote Creek Trail is still gravel (which is always awful to ride) and then it dumps you on to streets to cross over highway 237. It picked up north of 237 and is nicer up there, but then it stopped when it hit ... Fremont.

Overall, some wonderful trails. San Jose has really done a great job of creating trails in the 25 years since I moved away. If they can finish the Coyote and Guadalupe trails and connect them, they'll have a really impressive infrastructure for getting through the city North and South.

Also, I was reminded of what the streets are like in the south bay, as I rode them for at perhaps 20 miles of my ride. They're all huge with many lanes ... and simultaneously empty. Very ugly, but easy to use. And there were good bike lanes everywhere; in downtown San Jose those lanes were even buffered!

I expect I'm never going to repeat this particular ride. First, 48 miles was a lot. But also, BART is theoretically going to open a new Warm Springs station this Fall which will make all of San Jose more accessible to me by expanding the line several miles southward. Heck, that might be just enough that I could ride down to San Martin if I wanted (and ride back a separate day!)

I actually stopped and gawked at two of the BART stations under construction while in the South Bay. The Warm Springs station indeed looks like it might be done sometime in the foreseeable future, though I wouldn't bank on this year. The Berryessa BART station was clearly further from completion (though it's the one that will really open the entire south bay to me, and would cut a trip to San Martin down to a very reasonable 30 miles).

No one told me Donald and Mary had a pool. NEXT TIME!