Vacation at Home

Hidden Walks in the Bay Area

Piedmont

This book I’m balancing on my lap, Hidden Walks in the Bay Area, by Stephen Altschuler, has brought me so much joy over the years we have lived in the Bay Area. Altschuler has created several one to four mile walks in Berkeley, Oakland, Piedmont, Kensington, Albany, Mill Valley, Sausalito, San Anselmo, Fairfax and Belvedere. (Note that he leaves San Francisco to the plethora of other writers.) I think I have walked all of them in the years we’ve lived here.

I recently took myself on the Piedmont Hi-Lines walk last Thursday. I am so sorry that I forgot my new I-Phone, (a pretty aqua 5C, I may say!), so I don’t have any pictures to show you. Darn it! But listen to this great day on vacation at home!

It was just a perfect day, starting with a morning of lots of coffee and rotating the closet, bringing out the fall clothes and the boots and the browns and rusts and putting away the sandals and sundresses and sleeveless tops to the other side of the closet. (Of course it’s still over 80 degrees in the Bay Area autumn, but never mind, I like to get it done!)

Then, I packed the cooler and my bag full of books and lawn chair and headed to pretty Piedmont Park. I pulled out Hidden Walks in the Bay Area and began my sojourn through the Piedmont Hills, high above the Bay. Another reason this is so meaningful for me, is it is the first time I’ve been on one of these walks since the vertigo. It filled me with the same joy of adventure that it gave me when we first moved here seventeen years ago and I was discovering my new environment. It was like it was new again! Like I am new again! Healing and good memories flooded through my cells.

The views were staggeringly (is that a word?) gorgeous; a full panorama of the bay, including my beloved Lake Merritt, (is that the top of our condo building?), squares of green  and parks amidst stately buildings and the new Bay Bridge spiraling in the sunlight. I walked under the burnt blue sky and towering trees of this established neighborhood and skipped down hidden stairways between houses and labored up them, too (Happiness Project Resolution: take the stairs). 

I wandered along Bellevue Avenue, with its elegant homes and leaded glass windows, fountains and statues and manicured lawns, (Who lives in these homes? I heard one of them has a bowling alley!) I finished the walk on tiny Poplar Way, marked by a perfect redwood tree in the very middle of the road, (ah, how I wish I had my camera for you!) and its basketball hoop right in the middle of the street. I imagined it open to all the people living in the sweet homes surrounding it.

Then it was back to Piedmont Park, and the delicious laying out of the colorful scarf, upon which went the lawn chair, cooler, book bag and me; all settling in for a wonderful afternoon of it, two miles at most from our neighborhood. Vacation at home indeed!

Friends, this is a perfect time to get out there in the sun. The sky is blue, the colors are vibrant and the air feels so good on your skin. You can sit right in the sun without being hot. Now that is a perfect day. I bet there are similar books written about the area you live; documenting walks and libraries and museums, and pretty neighborhoods and cafes, all within a few miles of your house. I encourage you to find all of the jewels you can savor in your own home town.