I made spaghetti bolognese while my sisters were on a walk. They offered me wine and pilsner. The meal with dad went well. There were cupcakes. The boys returned to watching television and eventually dad went to bed. I chatted with my sisters until we brought Monopoly out again. Monopoly gets boring after a while I think. We watched our TV shows and we went to bed.
I slept until 11 the next morning and then I went up and checked the boys and found that they had eaten, made their beds and were dressed. They were playing Risk, which was pretty cute given their age. I had breakfast. We got ready to go by noon.
We rode through the playground at 45th in Golden Gate Park, which has a big boat, and then we continued up MLK. After the waterfall, the coffee cart was not working so I went to get coffee at Alvord Lake. We took the tunnel there. We watched bocce ball and then we went to Whole Foods. Then we rode our bikes down Page Street and carried everything inside when we got to the apartment.
I called one of the dads from the boys’ school and arranged to meet at the Kabuki Theater where we sat through the Minecraft Movie. The boys liked it. Then we went to the pizza place that everybody likes on Hayes Street. The pizza place is really small so we ended up speaking to a lot of people. Later, after we said bye to our friends, we went back to the apartment. We had been riding my Brompton bike around. The boys loved it.
In the morning of the day that I wrote this, I woke up at 8 o’clock, and the boys were already up in the living room. We got ready. We took the bikes down and our three normal bikes rode 13th and seventh to Caltrain. I got us some breakfast.
We rode to Menlo Park playing Uno, but didn’t finish. Then we went to Starbucks and I got a map. A bit later, we stopped at a playground. Then we went to San Mateo Drive and had some water at the bridge.
We were riding along San Francisquito Creek next to the university dorms there and I was trying to get us through a patch of wood chips and I looked back and the boys were just taking their time so I insisted that they catch up but didn’t slow down. It turned out at some point, my son was very concerned that his wheel was moving really slow. So, I stopped to look and sure enough there was a bungee cord in his wheel. The bike turned out fine though.
After that, we rode to the golf course and up campus drive before climbing up to Carnegie and the Observatory. I found the way through to the dish properties, but we descended and looked at the Stanford dish gate from one of the entrances.
In retrospect, I noted later that we probably could’ve hopped the fences at the observatory to pass through the dish property. However, it didn’t matter either way. I noted that there were a number of other potential routes through there. FOr instance there is a pipeline that connects to the reservoir up there and a dirt road behind the golf course.
After that we went to Lagonita, the big lake behind the university and that was really interesting. We had to ford a stream but the rest was great. When we got to the student union, I found the one spot where you can fix your bike and I pumped up my tires and I checked the boys’ bikes.
We went to the Hoover Tower before going over to Palm Street and up Lasuen. I was dissatisfied with those streets because El Camino Blvd is still a terrible place – even with the improvements they were actively adding while we rode through. In fact the crossing was made worse the bike lane construction.
We went to Verve. Then we rode to Caltrain. We sat next to some ladies on the way back to SF. We transferred at Milbrae and the three of us rode on our bikes from 16th St to the apartment.
This is an occasional series chronicling my life. This Notebook Analysis series is meant to be contemporaneous piece developed as an agglomeration of my notebook pages. In each of these posts I used my notes to develop my recent thoughts.
