Riding Around

Since getting back home I've gone for about an hour's ride every day - I need the exercise and I hate running. My new bike has forks and some seat-post suspension - and I like the brakes.
The bike path where (in spots) the kids make their own whoops and jumps is down at the end of the street, and goes for miles - all they way out to the Bay. We also have some new stuff going up around here, a bridge over Moffett Drive out towards Hanger-1, and further path extensions up Steven's Creek in the other direction, on the other side of El Camino.
Sometimes it looks foreboding but if you look closely on the left there's a soundwall and a freeway on the other side, not woods and more woods.


We're actually lucky to have a creek at all. In neighboring towns (*cough Palo*cough*Alto*) all the creeks going to the Bay have been turned into cement-culverts for the water district guys. Back in the day the priority was runoff-management and the answer was civil engineering. When Silicon Valley got going the land became too valuable to just let nature take its course - and what didn't belong to one city or another belonged to the Naval Air Station.

Looking down from a bridge, in a kinda derelict area over behind an old oil-company, that's the creek - and another sound-wall where Hwy 237 curves around it. It's bone dry, not much happens after the rain stops in April.


The new bike/pedestrian bridge is pretty cool. There must be a bunch of Stimulus Pork "Murtha-Money" in that earmark - count on the well-connected around here to get it done.
At least it eliminates a hazardous choke-point where pedestrians try to cross an ill-defined intersection and sometimes get run-over. It's gonna open in June.

Out past the bridge is a tunnel underneath all eight lanes of busy Highway 101, heading on out to the Bay and Shoreline Ampitheater where the rockers and deadheads play, and the backside of Moffett Field that's all old toxic Navy junk - and some weird structures where cops and firemen play.

Meanwhile the creek has ducks and other wildlife - cow-birds and herons mostly. I don't think there's been a fish in it in fifty years. It runs right out past the north end of the airfield.

That's Hanger-1 and the NASA wind-tunnel complex. They say it's all shut down now (the wind-tunnel) but I swear sometimes late at night I still hear it. While I was enjoying the evening breeze a Blackwhawk flew over...