Bay Area, 19-Jul
This was a quiet day for us, the first one of the trip. We walked along the Los Gatos Creek in the morning, met some friends for lunch, and hung out at a café in the afternoon.
When we are on a longer trip, we try to schedule days which are less busy. It helps us to have a break every now and then. Since we were with the hiking group for the first half of the trip, we just followed that schedule for the most part, but we did try to take afternoons off, especially in Lassen, which was pretty hot. By the time we got to San Jose, the third full day was what made sense for our rest day.
Since the only scheduled thing was lunch with friends, we figured the morning would be better to go out walking before it got hotter. We decided to go to Los Gatos Creek County Park so we could walk along the Los Gatos Creek. We ended up walking up to Campbell Park, then back on the other side of the creek as far as we could before crossing one of the bridges across the creek to the west side. We then walked around the Oka ponds at the south end of the park.
After our walk, we went to the Pruneyard in Campbell to have lunch with a couple of friends of mine from college. We kept chatting, even though several times we said that it was time to head out. We talked a lot about travel and caught up on how family is doing.
When we finally left the restaurant, Melody and I went to another part of the Pruneyard to have some ice cream, and then to a café to relax for a couple of hours. Then it was back towards the side where we parked to pick up some groceries, then we finally left the Pruneyard to go back to our room for the night.
