On Saturday I got up and decided I didn’t feel like running from the Lodge. So, I looked at parks on the internet and found another park in the Santa Cruz mountains not far from where I had gone the last time. The website I was looking at said the trails in El Corte Madera park were of “easy” difficulty.
I guess “easy” here means “pure pain” at home.
Actually, it wasn’t that bad, but it did get rough. This time I drove to the top of the mountains, went downhill first, and then finished uphill. That wasn’t my intention, but it’s what happened. I had originally planned to run along a trail that paralleled Skyline Boulevard. Of course, everything looks different in person than it does on a map, so when I got to the park, I just went exploring.
For the most part it was a really nice place with more towering trees covering everything. At times, I could look out towards the Pacific, with more mountains to the west. Most of the trails traversed the mountain, so just about all of them had a rock wall on one side and a steep drop off on the other. The trails were rocky and narrow and there were a lot of mountain bikers. I don’t see how anyone could bike on those trails with the steep terrain and especially the rocks, but every once in awhile I would run into a dust cloud with a cyclist inside.
The good thing was that the trails were well marked at every intersection so I could roughly find my way around. I probably looped around 3/4 of the whole park. The website claimed the park had upwards of 30 miles of trails, but I did just under 12, so there were a lot more.
The last 20 to 30 minutes was really bad. It was a gruelling climb back up to the top and it never seemed to end. It was a lot longer than at Huddart, but not quite as steep. To make things worse, I thought the trail would dump me back at my car when I got to the top, but instead I was still a mile or two away. At that point, I did the survival shuffle back to the car. As before, I was gone an hour and a half, but my watch told me I was still under 12 miles.
That night I made a baked pasta dish with ground beef, cheese, onions, garlic, and tomato sauce. It was definitely the best thing I’ve made since I’ve been here but it took awhile to make and I was ready to collapse afterwards. The pasta made enough to last for several days, which was good.
On Sunday, I was pretty sore on my run and just stayed on the Stevens Creek Trail and went into Mountain View and back. Just about everything from the waist down was hurting (and still is today). It’s going to take me awhile to recover from that.
In the afternoon I went to the Computer History Museum, which is more or less down the street from Ames. Inside is a large room with a bunch of old computers. There were a few people giving tours and I tagged along on both of them. A lot of the machines there I had heard of before. Several of them I remember my Computer Architecture professor talking about because they represented a major milestone in some sense or another — the first massively parallel computer, the first to use vector registers, etc. Some of the old ones were real pieces of junk with wires and switches all over the place. Looking at some of the consoles, I had no idea what any of the switches or lights meant. With many of the older machines, the tour guide remarked that what we saw was only a piece of the entire computer and that the whole thing would take up the entire room.
There was a PC section that had an old Apple II. I remember using those in elementary school and those were pieces of junk even then.
Before dinner I went to the grocery store and got ingredients for a peanut butter pie that my mom made that’s really good. I followed the recipe when I got back. During the process I learned that milk can burn and leave a nasty residue in the pan that is near impossible clean. I also found that licking the pan after everything is done is better than eating the pie itself. I’m not sure if I followed the recipe exactly because the pan with the eggs in it was only on the stove for a few seconds, but it tastes about as good as it has before and I haven’t gotten sick.
I’m still kind of split on the whole meal plan thing for next year. It seems that it might be more trouble than it’s worth to cook on my own, even with a kitchen in the apartment. If I still practice with the team on most days, the last thing I want to do is spend 30 minutes or more cooking something. At this point I’m kind of leaning towards getting one of the cheaper meal plans so that I can cook some of the time, but most of the time I can just go to the caf. It will be kind of weird going there with most everyone being a fair amount younger than me, so I’m not entirely sure what I will do.
At this point I’ve only got a handful of weekends left before I have to go back home. I should probably think of everything else I want to do before I go and make an effort to do it before I run out of time. I’m pretty sure I want to go to San Francisco again since there is a lot to do there and I also want to check out some other good places to run. I don’t really have any specific places in mind that I want to visit. The only place I can think of is Alcatraz, but you have to get tickets way in advance for that. It might also be interesting to go to a baseball game or something since there aren’t any major league teams at home.
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