Flâneurs

I did theme I for the June challenge in July, and now I've just done theme II in August. I assume I'll be doing theme II in September.

Theme II(c), which I selected randomly from the four variations on Theme II, says "Visit your local council's website and find their walks page (example: Walks in Hillingdon). If they don't have one, choose a neighbouring local council and try again." I had to alter this a bit since I live in America where we don't have such quaint notions as city councils that put together walks guides. I wanted to do a walk in Mountain View, where I work, so I could go back to the office afterward and also because the first hit for "walks in San José" (where I live) was a dog walking service, so that's not very promising. The city of Mountain View itself does have a page of walks, but it was really just a list of multi-use trails and I wasn't that interested in walking on a bike trail. Then I found a list of walks on the Mountain View Trees web site. Bonanza! As per instructions, I picked the first walk, the Bush Street Tree Walk [PDF].

This was a very short walk, but came with a detailed description [link to a Word document for some ungodly reason] of 21 trees along the route. I'm not gonna lie: I may not agree with anything about Ronald Reagan's politics, but "once you've seen one tree, you've seen them all" does ring true for me on a personal level. And this walk didn't really change that, with two exceptions: the two giant Coastal Redwood trees (those were pretty awe-inspiring, and I didn't realize they were just two blocks off from a street I regularly walk or bike on to get to work) and the avocado tree. Food >> trees, and I hadn't seen avocadoes outside a supermarket in a while.

Pictures to come once my camera is charged enough to upload them. This was far from the most exciting walk ever, but only needing to walk about 10 minutes from work to get to the starting point was a big factor in me actually finishing this theme :-)

ETA: For those who *don't* think that once you've seen one tree, you've seen them all, pictures of the first couple of trees. After that, my battery ran out. (Also, today I learned that I don't like Shutterfly; however, I used up all my bandwidth on Flickr.)