It's been a heckuva day. Biking and food.
After lunch, I set off on a bike trip with Joel, a fellow student in the department. Doantam, also a Ph.D. student, had been planning to go too, but he'd hurt his foot yesterday. I led over to the San Antonio shopping center just because Joel didn't know where it was.
Then we looked at my map and decided to visit the Baylands area to the northeast. It looked like San Antonio Road would take us there, and coincidentally that was where we were already, so we followed it. After a bit the traffic started to get really scary and the bike lane disappeared, contrary to what the map claimed, so we reconsidered our course. We only had a few choices due to the 101 expressway across our path, which simply cuts off and dead ends most of the transverse roads.
Our next angle of attack was along Charleston Road. As it turned out, this too dead-ended at 101. The map seemed to indicate otherwise, but what can you do?
Finally we biked all the way back to Embarcadero Road and tried again. This actually led us across 101 and into the Baylands. This turned out to be a nice place to bike. We couldn't get too close to the San Francisco Bay itself because Joel was on a road bike, not a mountain bike, but we did get a nice view in some places, especially when we were near what we concluded from the map was Mountain View Slough, a narrow finger of water stretching from the bay a mile or more into the adjoining land.
When we grew tired of the Baylands we took a paved path running alongside Stevens Creek on the one side and the 85 expressway on the other. We got off at Central Ave and made our way to Central Expressway, which despite the name has a bike lane. After some map-reading and a lot of biking, we made it back to campus. That's a three and a half hour bike trip, in total.
I made chicken curry for dinner. Yum. And I then went to see Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back at Flicks. Crude but fun.