Water, water

(posted after midnight July 1)

OK, today I have a bit of sightseeing and a photo or two for you. I spent a couple of hours this afternoon exploring the Shoreline at Mountain View Park. A gorgeous sunny cool day and a totally flat park - I can't really call it exercise.

I started at the park's saltwater lake, where I watched windsurfers swirling in the steady stiff breeze like butterflies - and high-performance windsurfers, which I'd never seen, speeding past them like supercharged dragonflies. I shot some video of these that I'll eventually put online.

From the lake I crossed a narrow strip of sea-grass to the shore of San Francisco Bay near its southern tip at San Jose. If you've ever flown into San Jose Airport you may have noticed a multicolored patchwork of salt evaporation ponds lining the tip of the bay. (I've reproduced an aerial photo below.) In my photo at left (click to enlarge), you can see the levee separating two of the ponds, and the contrasting colors of the water due to differences in salinity.

Before leaving the park I briefly visited the Rengstorff House, the restored 19th-century mansion of a land baron who made his fortune right after the Gold Rush without panning for gold. In its heyday the house you see here was just a short distance from docks where Rengstorff grain and cattle or hides were loaded onto ships.

Purely by coincidence, I just finished reading Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, an account of sailing ships trading cowhides up and down the mostly unpopulated Mexican California coast in 1834-35, with an epilogue about the author's return by steamship in 1859 to find the new U.S. state transformed by cities, docks, and bustling economic activity. He doesn't mention the Rengstorffs.

PS. This laptop is happy now, and acting friskier. I traded in the memory card that didn't work for one that does. Happiness is 2G RAM.

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Aerial photo of salt evaporation ponds at the southern tip of San Francisco Bay. (Mapquest photo) San Jose is just off the lower right corner. The red oval surrounds the part of the park where I walked today. According to a number of websites I found, the ponds are operated by Cargill Salt.