June Challenge, Theme III, (d), "Doing Something Different"

[tim]

This is a walk I did a couple of weeks ago, but I didn't get around to doing the writeup. For Theme III, I chose option (d): "First, choose the duration of your adventure; anything from five minutes to five hours. Start at your home or workplace. Take the first left, then the second right, then the first left, then the second right, etc, etc."

I started from the Mountain View public library at Franklin and Mercy in downtown Mountain View, California (two blocks from my workplace), and decided to walk for an hour, extending it for another hour if I was having fun.

( I didn't extend it. )

June Challenge, Theme I, (d), "Buses"

[tim]

So the very same evening that I did my aforementioned walk, I decided to try another challenge, since the walk was kind of lackluster. Having already done one from each category, I picked a theme at random to repeat, and chose Theme I (buses). Generating another random number, I picked challenge (d), where you pick a number n between 3 and 20, figure out what the nth stop is on a bus line running from the closest stop to your home or workplace (I was at work, so I picked work), and navigate there using any method other than buses.

My random number was 12, and the closest bus stop was the westbound 22 bus stop at El Camino Real and Castro in Mountain View, CA. The 12th stop going west was at El Camino Real and Curtner in Palo Alto, near the California Ave. Caltrain station. I had the options of biking there, walking, or taking the train; generating another random number, I ended up walking. The 22 bus in this area runs down just one major thoroughfare, El Camino Real, so my walk was just down the one street.

The walk took about an hour and a half, and I left at 8 PM, so more of it was in the dark than I would have liked. It made for an interesting contrast with my suburban residential walk earlier, because El Camino Real is boring in a different way: scaled for cars, not people; businesses oriented towards keeping your car going (lube shops and gas stations) and keeping you alive and awake long enough to drive your car somewhere else (motels and fast food). That's El Camino Real. The Mountain View part is junkier and more oriented towards selling you cheap stuff you don't need; when you get to Palo Alto, it's more about motels and one contemplates a time before interstate freeways when you would take a lengthy road trip that was just down 40-miles-an-hour roads through suburban areas.

When I got to the bus stop, the terrain was just starting to look like someplace people lived instead of a strip-mall/motel wasteland. Not counting waiting, the bus ride back to El Camino Real and Castro took 15 minutes.