Day Three was Epic

Day three was the most epic so far. We walked 33 miles, spent 14 hours outdoors, offroaded, peed on a couple trees, and almost went crazy.

Waking up at 6am to clean up the apartment a little (thanks Carolle and Dave for letting us stay in your place!) we headed out with freshly cleaned clothes (apartments with laundry close by will be a luxury that we know we will appreciate). We started walking at 630 and made it toward the Dumbarton Bridge (the longest bridge EVER! maybe not really). On the way we were able to stop by the Facebook Headquarters, where we crossed the road illegally a couple times to sneak onto their landscaping to take some pretty amazing pictures.

Tim at Facebook, they didn’t invite us in for a tour 😦

The bridge was interesting, the actual over-water part is about 1.5 miles, but with the approach and descent it’s over 5 miles and feels like 300. There was an abandoned railway bridge to the south of the Dumbarton that was a pretty gorgeous view and we could see some fishermen down on a dock. We even crossed into a new town (Fremont!) even though the end of the bridge is technically in Newark.

The Dumbarton, we crossed that dinosaur-looking thing

The railroad bridge that we didn’t try to cross, luckily, because it wasn’t connected!

After crossing the bridge we saw a port-a-potty (yay) but unfortunately it was locked. After walking for about 3.5 hours we really had to pee. Luckily the stop to investigate around the port-a-potty forced us to appreciate the post-apocalyptic feel of the after-bridge section. It was gorgeously bleak. (Don’t worry, there was a perfect tree just beyond the locked port-a-potty, our first illegal pee break!)

The gorgeous view after the bridge

However, crossing the bridge was only the beginning of the adventure of the day. We met up with Drew (one of Tim’s friends from his hometown of Griffith who moved to San Jose) where we caught up in a Starbucks as we used their wi-fi and relaxed for a minute before we walked about 2 miles with him and took our Newark city sign pic with him (we used the timer on our camera for the first time!) We had time for a long lunch so we stopped to eat with him too and headed on our way.

Us with Drew at the Newark sign. Thanks for joining us!

Some of the sidewalks outside of Newark weren’t the easiest to walk on

We got onto highway 84 where it was hot, but we stopped at a gas station to buy Gatorade and started out on the road. The views as we walked were gorgeous, and for the first time (but definitely not the last) we were out of the built environment and able to start enjoying nature!

The trees on the hillside were so fun looking, we almost wanted to run up there to lay in the shade, but they were much farther than they looked

The shoulder along highway 84 got really tight so we had to improvise. There was a dry riverbed with a nice path leading down to it that we could see on Google Maps (thanks Google and modern technology!) Unfortunately, there was some poison oak on that path (luckily, Rebecca is immune, Tim.. not so much).

Walking in the riverbed

We finally made it Sunol (a really cute railroad based town that’s hard to correctly pronounce) after climbing random hills and through plants and over rocks and around a river! We were already 25 miles in, but we still had 8 miles to go despite both being tired, hot, and ready to be done for the day. If we had our full packs we probably would stop right there to camp, but we had a bed and a shower waiting for us in Livermore so we were going to make it (we also haven’t been carrying our tent/sleeping bags so we didn’t really have a choice)!

We were exhausted by the time we got to Sunol.

We stopped in town to buy some beef jerky (Tim) and ice cream (Rebecca) while we decided if we could make it, which of course, we could! We also visited the statue of Bosco, the dog mayor (he was mayor of Sunol from 1981 to 1994). This is a fact.

I Googled “dog jokes” and there were too many to choose from

Today we walked through:
Palo Alto
Menlo Park
East Palo Alto
Newark
Fremont
Union City
Sunol
Livermore

Rebecca: 71,970 steps
Tim: 67,044 steps

84 miles finished!!