When I visited Pegasus books for their annual calendar sale, I not only got 2 calendars (@$3.99 apiece) but I purchased a map of Berkeley paths. (By walking up to the bookshop, I also passed my 10,000-step goal! By day’s end I’d taken 12,139 steps, or 5.1 miles.)
According to my map/guide, Berkeley and Its Pathways, there are 136 marked paths in the city of Berkeley of varying length and accessibility. Before I even opened the map, I met a woman at my Weight Watchers meeting who was planning to walk all the paths in the guide. What are the odds? I saw it as a sign that I should go for it. So I loaded up Ruby, our 10-month old pup, into the Rav 4 and headed for Path #1.
I parked at the bend in Keoncrest Drive, where a sign clearly marked the path. Tree branches reached across to each other above our heads in a lovely partial canopy as we made our way between the houses on either side. But the official path ends on Sacramento Street, less than a block away. So we extended our trek to include the surrounding neighborhood, getting off Sacramento at Cedar, where we headed west a block to Acton and then turned back north to Tomlee Dr., which led us to Juanita Way, and just beyond it, Cedar Rose Park. I could tell Ruby was excited by the way she pulled on her leash, and I let her run free once we got into the heart of the grassy field. There we met 4-month old Riley, who looked like a shepherd mix and wasn’t as interested in the tennis ball that was hers as she was romping with Ruby. A few older dogs joined in, and Ruby got in a short but healthy dose of chasing.
We stayed at the park a while before taking a slightly different route back to the car via Rose Street and the upper part of Juanita Way, where we encountered a lovely mermaid on a house that also donned candy-cane lights–the vestiges of Christmas decorations still adorning a number of the houses there.
It was a good beginning. Now I just have 135 paths to go…
The View from a Berkeley Optimist 