Day 0: Circle The Bay Part 3
April 2018
I'm ready to embark on another circumnavigation of San Francisco Bay, except this time clockwise on a bike. I'll stick as close to the Bay Trail as possible but my bike isn't a mountain bike ready for anything. And it wasn't a mountain bike the first time I rode through the Bay Area in 1980 either. In fact they didn't exist as far as we knew up until that moment peddling through Fairfax in 1980 and getting approached by a bike store owner who wanted to show off his latest invention of an all-terrain highly geared two wheel bike. It made me feel California was so cool and ahead of the times.
I wrote postcards to my girlfriend back in Minnesota every day of that trip. One night we stayed with the aunt of the guy I was riding with in Palo Alto. I had a postcard to mail and asked if I could leave it in her mailbox, but she said I should take it to a street-corner box because her mail-person didn't like to pickup mail while delivering. So I have a memory of riding up El Camino a town or two before finding a US Post Office that in memory I've convinced myself is the town we've lived in for almost twenty years. I will have to go run that postcard down.
Now for this trip, instead of a postcard, I'll write a blog entry, which will go on my permanent record (hey I just found my previous attempts at blogging!: http://scottsviewport.blogspot.com)
A year ago I hiked around the entire San Francisco Bay. It took me 31 days of walking 4 days a week for a total of 374 miles. I used as much public transportation as I could to get to the start of each new day of walking, augmenting with either the buying or selling of Uber rides. It was a great distraction from obsessively following Twitter breaking news on the Watergate of my adult life. Still as true as it was a year ago, except now more people are aware of what we're dealing with.
I want to get back out there and re-experience every bit of the bay's shoreline. Things are hopefully changing for me in the near future, and I might have a future doing more than walking (or biking) by Silicon Valley. But I am very glad I've done these treks when I had the time. I've come to love San Francisco Bay in a way that alluded me for decades. Now I can think of it as a massive, powerful, and divine body of water instead of a shallow basin encroached and encaged by bridges and freeways. It is not something to disrupt. It is something we must disrupt ourselves to protect.
A year ago I hiked around the entire San Francisco Bay. It took me 31 days of walking 4 days a week for a total of 374 miles. I used as much public transportation as I could to get to the start of each new day of walking, augmenting with either the buying or selling of Uber rides. It was a great distraction from obsessively following Twitter breaking news on the Watergate of my adult life. Still as true as it was a year ago, except now more people are aware of what we're dealing with.
I want to get back out there and re-experience every bit of the bay's shoreline. Things are hopefully changing for me in the near future, and I might have a future doing more than walking (or biking) by Silicon Valley. But I am very glad I've done these treks when I had the time. I've come to love San Francisco Bay in a way that alluded me for decades. Now I can think of it as a massive, powerful, and divine body of water instead of a shallow basin encroached and encaged by bridges and freeways. It is not something to disrupt. It is something we must disrupt ourselves to protect.
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