Author name: Clairet

January 11, 2024. This expedition took in some Interesting sights around my Berkeley neighborhood. I relied on the book Quirky Berkeley for some ideas. I chose a route that was easy to bicycle on my non-electric bike.   My first stop was at the wiener dog house near Ashby BART. The owner has actual living dachshunds […]

January 3, 2024. This expedition was the first of my planned local movie locations series. San Francisco, in particular, is chock full of shooting locations. For my inaugural exploration I chose Dirty Harry. I wanted to combine this with a good e-bike ride so I started with the iconic Mt. Davidson location. The bike did

December 20, 2023. First stop: Preservation Park. I forgot that five of the houses were originally here and the others were brought later and laid out like a neighborhood. I was there around lunch time and it was pretty deserted. In the cafe, the owner told me he’s only open for lunch now, not breakfast,

December 13, 2023. I decided to get an early start today and had breakfast out. I ended up at a cute old school diner in Walnut Creek with stools at the counter. Friendly people but food was bland. Onward! My first stop was The Lindsay Wildlife Experience. It’s a lot like SF’s Randall Museum and

December 7, 2023. This ended up being a short expedition because I got rained out after this first stop. I visited this Oakland park once years ago after I happened to spot the fly casting pools from the street and wondered what those odd things could be. I couldn’t find any information about the circular

November 29, 2023. San Pablo Avenue runs from downtown Oakland up to Crockett, about 23 miles, and is one of the oldest and longest roads in the Bay Area, appearing on a map in 1830. It became part of the transcontinental Lincoln Highway and was the main north south thoroughfare until the Eastshore Freeway was

November 15, 2023. I got to SF around noon to walk the southern part of the Crosstown Trail. The trail opened in 2019 and “runs through hidden trails, public parks, shopping corridors, tiled stairways, and community gardens along the way” according to the website. It’s about 45% roads and sidewalks, 15% paved off-road paths, and

November 8, 2023. North Berkeley has tons of pathways and staircases that connect streets up and down the hills. Some blocks up here are fairly long so the paths provide short cuts between streets. I selected five pathways to walk and when Google maps connected them for me I ended up getting three or four

November 1, 2023. I was looking forward to seeing beavers in Fairfield where they’ve constructed dams along Laurel Creek which runs through town, but I did not. I know they’re active from dusk to dawn so I arrived around sunset. Unfortunately, I don’t actually know what a beaver’s dam looks like. I saw a few

October 25, 2023. This neighborhood doesn’t have as many Russian businesses as it used to, but it’s still going strong. My first stop was Globus Books. It’s small and there were several people there browsing. I saw a handful of books in English and enjoyed looking at a book of street photos taken in Russia