California Here We Come

After our trek through San Francisco into Millbrae we were pretty tired and passed out early (Rebecca fell asleep as Tim proofread the blog post, at 930pm) but we woke up and caught the train back to Millbrae to arrive by 8am where we met Eric, Tim’s roommate for many years in Chicago who is now in law school at Berkeley. Starting the second day of our walk with a friend has made this seem like a vacation of visiting old friends and reconnecting with bad jokes all around.

Eric caught the El Camino Real bus back to the Millbrae Bart station to get to a meeting with a professor in Berkeley, then he played basketball. No question that he was sore the next day.

We finished about 25 miles by the end of the day, 10 with Eric and the rest alone, for the first time on the trip. The walk felt a lot like our walk to Wisconsin with fancy suburbs with nice old-timey downtowns. Most of the walk was along El Camino Real which is loud, and busy, and dirty, and hot. When Rebecca started getting crabby because the noise was horrible, we found a neighborhood to walk through that calmed us down a lot and led us to a park with a nice (though hot) bathroom. Finding bathrooms in semi-urban areas is a little hard sometimes; you can’t just stop next to a tree, you have to at least act like a civilized person and try to find a bathroom.

We saw and old bowling alley that is now a car wash….

We finished our day by walking toward the Stanford campus hoping to find a Stanford University sign. Thinking we’d see one soon, we ended up walking an extra 2 miles and were unable to find a sign on the road. We settled for turning back around and trudging into Palo Alto where we bought a Hostess cupcake (to celebrate Kevin’s birthday! wecanwalk.wordpress.com) and eating a pretty mediocre to terrible Thai meal and crawled into bed tired and ready for our first day with our packs into Livermore tomorrow.

Happy Birthday Kevin!

Today we walked through:
Millbrae
Burlingame
Hillsborough
San Mateo
Belmont
San Carlos
Redwood City
North Fair Oaks
Atherton
Menlo Park
Palo Alto

Rebecca: 52,050 steps
Tim: 49,372 steps

51 miles finished!!