The Drive

So with Dea out of the country for a while, I decided to go for a bit of a drive yesterday. Dea gets car sick driving through the salt flats on a 6 lane freeway so I haven't been making full use of lateral stability capabilities of the 'Vette much.

A co-worker invited me to a luncheon with everyone he knows to meet his new baby. Not usually my kind of thing, but with Dea gone I get hungry, and the lunch was in central California (i.e. outside silicon valley). I had to wake up a little earlier than I get up for work so I could hit the San Mateo bridge on the way. It's over 11 km long and crosses the San Fransisco Bay. Most if it is a causeway though, so not as cool as some of the other bridges over the bay. Then I drove through Haywayrd and across the valley walls using I-580. It was nice, but an 8 lane freeway with a train running in the median just isn't sufficient to squeal the tires on the Vette.

It was weird being in a chinese restaurant with 100 of my closest chinese friends and having almost none of them using chopsticks. In silicon valley, the yuppies rule, and use of a fork in an asian restaurant is so low-brow. There they just see forks as more convenient.

Anyway, for the drive back I decided not to take the freeway. Thing is, though, the freeway uses the only major pass between the central valley and SV. In fact there's only one other road: Del Puerto Canyon Rd. It's 40 km of climbing winding canyon roads barely wider that 2 cars. But nice pavement. At one point it starts climbing out of the canyon. It's about 15% grade, and just perfectly winding so you never take a hand off the wheel but never stop moving it either. 2 seconds left, 3 seconds right, 1 second left... Amazing 2km or so...

But this canyon road only takes me halfway home. And there's not road through the passes near there. The only road is the Mt. Hamilton road. Another 30 km, but this time climbing the side of a mountain. This one was mostly switch backs and elevation gain. The top of the mountain is a little over 1250m. That's almost as high as Canmore. From the top you can see the entire silicon valley and San Fransisco bay.

But why would they build a road to the top of the tallest mountain? To put an observatory of course. The Lick Observatory (named after James Lick you pervert) is a UC Berkley facility with some of the greatest telescopes ever built. Of course the pollution is so bad now that they haven't built anything in 50 years, but it had the largest telescope in the world in 1888. It is still a big observatory with a dozen telscopes. I took a tour of the original big one and then it was time to go home.

The drive down from the observatory is even windier than the way up. It was build in 1876 so horses could bring up construction material for the observatory. I was in second gear the whole way down, and never had to touch the gas. Woo hoo...

Anyway, I was feeling a little car sick myself by the time I was done, but it was certainly a fun day. Of course seeing a baby neice would have been fun too, but what can you do?

Adam