On a 90-degree Thursday afternoon I decide that instead of jumping in my backyard pool, I will drive my car up into the hills of Saratoga to Villa Montalvo. The area offers miles of hiking trails, three performance venues, exhibitions and gardens for vistors’ enjoyment. Driving up, I find the road lined with fancy houses and trees providing abundant shade.
I arrive to find scarcely anyone around beside a few ladies having a picnic in a shade and a man walking his dog. Away from the noise of traffic, I walk around a few narrow trails and enjoy the fresh air. I discover my shoes are not the best for hiking, so I choose not to walk far. The trails, like the the road up, are covered with shade from the surrounding trees. I feel the rocks on the trail through the soles of my shoes as I walk up and down the inclines. Thirsty from the heat, I walk back down to the arts center, where I see a small bonsai exhibition, but no one inside. After walking around the center, I return to my car, enjoying the drive down.
Villa Montalvo provides an escape for anyone tired of urban landscapes, and it costs nothing besides time.
Money, no car:
Farmers’ Market
Saratoga’s farmers’ market is open from 8:30 am to 12 pm each Saturday morning at West Valley College. Drawn by the appeal of fresh fruits and vegetables, hordes of customers come each week to stock their weekly supplies of groceries and buy honey, flowers, shaved ice and various other products.
I visit the farmers’ market with my mother one Saturday near closing time intent on finding the perfect strawberries for an ideal strawberry-banana smoothie. Walking down the rows of canopies, I find about three vendors selling strawberries almost right next to each other and for about the same price. They each allow me to try samples, and I finally decide on buying three baskets for a total of $7 from one vendor.
One vendor is famous for selling salsa on one side of the farmers’ market. I try each of their salsas, miProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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, hot, and corn-flavored and manage to burn my tongue with too much hot salsa. My mother selects a few tomatoes from the same vendor and goes to pay for the salsa. At first the cashier announces the purchase as $6, then quickly changes it to $7.25 after reweighing the tomatoes. Upon realizing that my mother and I had both heard his first request, he only asks $6 from us. I find that the salsa itself is $5, but it proved a delicious lunch.
Bus Adventure
In recent years, with global warming and the ensuing hype to find ways to save the planet, people have tried to do everything from recycling to ditching their cars for public transportation.
As an experiment, one Saturday afternoon I board the bus for the first time in Saratoga with two friends aiming to go to the Stanford Shopping Center. After buying a $5 day pass on the number 57 bus at the West Valley College station, I sit down to find the bus empty besides my friends and myself. No other people approach the bus, but the driver keeps the door open for five minutes.
As soon as the bus begins its journey, I realize how bumpy the road is. The bus travels through Saratoga and into San Jose, stopping a few times along the way to pick up people, including a mother and two small children and an old man with a bike. I get off the bus at a stop in Santa Clara to transfer to the number 22 bus to Palo Alto.
The bus driver realizes my confusion in getting to the correct stop and points me in the right direction. I wait about fifteen minutes before the next bus arrives. During this time, my friends and I notice a man wheeling an old lady in a wheelchair. He stops her next to us and promptly walks away, leaving the lady shouting “Sir!” and waving a few dollar bills in her hand. The bus pulls up, and the lady asks the bus driver if she can board when much to my surprise, he says, “No, wait for the next one.”
With little we can do to help, my friends and I climb aboard to find this bus fairly full. To the annoyance of many, one loud, impatient man sitting at the back of the bus asks the driver every five minutes if Palo Alto is close.
The bus smells slightly of cigarette smoke and is fairly warm, so a few riders open the windows. The entire trip down El Camino to the Palo Alto Caltrain station takes almost an hour as many people get on and off the bus at various stops.
At the Caltrain station my friend informs me to look for the Marguerite shuttle to take us to the shopping center. However, I find that the shuttle arrives once every 45 minutes, and the next one would not arrive for half an hour. Upon first consulting the GPS on my iPad, I find the walk to the shopping center is supposedly five miles long. Stuck in a dilemma, I debate with my friends whether or not to go on this “five-mile walk” when I decide to refresh the page. This time, it provides us with a more accurate description of 0.4 miles.
I manage to become fairly confused with the roads surrounding the Caltrain Station and end up taking a longer route to the shopping center. Nevertheless, my friends and I arrive safely, though tired and hungry.
