Banished from San Francisco

I'm not really going to be able to beat the scenery in the last run of posts so i might as well start at the bottom, with powerlines. In early summer i had to leave Alaska to go to a vestibular center in Palo Alto. My brother lives in Oakland so i stayed with him for a few days. It was all short notice and he was in the middle of getting a new job so there wasn't any time for big excursions or for him to take a lot of time off. So i was left to find things to do on my own much of the time.

The funny thing was that in the 5 days i was there we never did go into San Francisco. So these pictures are of things or places to go in the areas outside the city.

Oakland

My brother lives in Oakland so i spent a lot of time walking his dog around the neighborhood or in the nice foothills above Oakland. Because i had been riding my bike a lot this past summer on single tracks i thought it would be cool to do that in California. I rented a not very good bike for the money and did a strenuous ride in a large parkland area called Juaquin Miller Park. Then i went up the hill for a longer ride in Redwood Regional Park.

 Although they were mostly large walking trails it was really fun to ride through a redwood forest.

 I ran into a bunch of goats. They are there to control fire danger. Basically they are being used to eat everything that is flammable.

 The trails have a lot of nice views.

I have at least have on funny story of the bikeride. At one point, in goat territory i stopped my bike and rested it against a fence to take a picture of the view. Somehow my seatpost got all tangled up in the wire fence as did my brake lever. When i tried to untangle it i got shocked. It was an electric fence! I should have known when i saw the goats. So that was a fun five minutes of getting shocked constantly while i untangled the bike.

 The foothills above the redwood forests.

 The back of my brother's head.

 We came several times up into these hills for dog walking.

Berkley

Berkley is an expensive place to visit, usually requiring around a $100 admission fee in the form of a parking ticket. If you don't want to pay that much it's best to avoid ever going there. You can find entire libraries of information on how difficult it is not to get a parking ticket there. I even found papers written by Economics professors at Berkley covering the subject. In my case, i was in town less than an hour before i had my ticket, despite having driven around for 10 minutes specifically to avoid parking illegally. It's the first time i've had a parking ticket in this country in 20 years. Fifteen years ago i did get a ticket from corrupt Mexican Police, and the Berkley situation is similar to that. Apparently i drove by an obscure sign, a mile from where i parked, in an area where you cannot stop driving. The sign said that if you did not stop to read the sign you would end up with a ticket. From what i have since read, prospective students of the university should add in several thousand extra dollars a year to the published tuition rates, to account for the parking tickets and permits.

Outside the library. The library has some really cool cylindrical storehouses underground with spiral walkways around the edges, lined with books. I was unable to access those areas without a student I.D.

In Berkley they are proud about their extinct bears.

 The campus is very pretty for walking.

 Another reading room in the library.

 Higgs Boson

 A funny gate and fence made out of the hatchback of cars.

Another fence/gate made of street signs.

This house had a facade made mostly out of road signs.

It's currently occupied by a company called Hugh Groman Catering.

Menlo Park/ Palo Alto

The doctors i had to go see were down near Palo Alto and i had to go down there twice. I drove past these cool salt flats on a toll road and so the second time since i had several hours between appointments i decided to go check those out. They are really cool despite being covered in power lines.

The salt flats look like they go on forever. Also forever are long wooden walkways over the briny water.

Waking along the old flimsy boardwalks. Many of the boards are rotten or not even attached on one end. The foundations seemed solid enough.

Some of the salt around the edges made cool geometric crystals.

Apparently in the last century there was an industrial salt mining operation going on down there with water being meticulously controlled through a series of dikes and dams. Today it is slowly being returned to a wetland area and is a wildlife refuge. While wandering around i saw a pair of animals i have never seen before. They looked like little dingos with big fluffy ears and they were quite scared of humans. They took off so fast i did not get a picture. As usual i enjoyed my time in the wastelands.

 Once you make it here you can walk really far off. I felt like i should have been dressed like the road warrior.