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Published: October 29th 2005
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San Francisco Bay
The view from Castle Rock State Park 14-17/10/05 Mountain View, CA
We travelled over the Sierra Nevada to Mountain View in the San Francisco Bay area to visit Tom and Julia. Vernon and Tom were flatmates when both were doing PhDs at Bangor University, but as with so many friendships we haven't seen each other for years.
On Friday we went to Amici's for a pizza and were treated to free entertainment when a customer collapsed on the floor, he seemed to recover, stood up, left the building and promptly collapsed again. The staff called 911 and two fire tenders turned up with a paramedic on board.
We spent Saturday searching for new bike helmets as ours, whilst they could be used as strange and interesting hanging baskets, are useless for head protection since the crash. The search took longer than expected as the fit was never quite right and the colour choice was very loud. We finally found what we needed, then we went to a camera shop to get a wide-angle lens for my camera - the landscapes are just too big here.
We were all up early on Sunday for a hike with Tom and some of his friends. The pace was
San Francisco Bay
The view from Castle Rock State Park cracking, we managed to keep up (ish) at first but by the end had slowed down. We had done no serious exercise for a month and it showed. We were even overtaken by Berndt with his two Leki sticks and one leg full of Meccano (ski injury). Aside from the poor show by half the British contingent the walk was fantastic, taking an 8.5 mile route around Castle Rock State Park in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It was mainly on easily walked trails, with the occasional bit of scrambling over boulders. We stopped for lunch by one massive boulder (I'm hoping somebody will supply the name of it) which most of the group climbed up to look at the view, I cheated by edging around the side of it to admire the view instead. Lunch was a remarkably civilised affair of bread, various meats and cheeses, salad, fruit and chocolate cake washed down with special grape juice (of course we didn't carry wine into a State Park, that would be against the law). After lunch we walked to Castle Rock before heading back to the cars.
On the way to the start of the hike we passed a group
Castle Rock
Enjoying a rest at the top. of runners on a 199 mile charity run, one of them was wearing a pair of shorts with a fake plastic bum on them, it was rather confusing from a distance.
In the evening all the group came over to Tom and Julia's for an end-of-season barbie when much food and drink were consumed and a good time was had by all. The Aussie contingent, having dined well on Aussie Burgers (burger, cheese, egg and beetroot in a bun) offered much advice with regards to the next two countries:
- New Zealand - there are no animals that will kill you, but the Kea (a flightless parrot) will eat your tyres and inner tubes.
- Australia - most of the animals will kill you and Kookaburras really, really hate sausages (they steal them off barbies and bash their insides out thinking that they are snakes).
We took our leave on Monday morning and headed towards Yellowstone, hoping to get there before the snows closed most of the roads.
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