Before meeting my in-laws for lunch, I took the opportunity to visit my old neighborhood and ride through the streets like I used to do when I was young. As a kid growing up in the foothills of San Jose, I had only two ways to go anywhere: asking your parents to drive you or riding your bike. Riding my bike, then, became a formative experience of my childhood. In those days, when navigation meant carrying a paper map, having an Etak installed in your car, or relying on your own sense of direction, I had an outline of the residential streets in Almaden Valley memorized. On each ride, I'd make slight variations to gather a little more data to fill in my mental map. I had a lot of wiggle room to explore Almaden Valley without ever riding on a major road with heavy/fast car traffic. I did that kind of semi-random ride through mostly residential streets today. In later years, I figured out how to cross over to the Santa Teresa corridor through Almaden Lake Park. By linking up various residential streets along the foothills, I came up with my own flat and long bike route as an alternative to Santa Teresa Blvd. This ride went a lot faster on my road bike than on the Specialized Rockhopper I used to have. (In those days, the Rockhopper was more like a hybrid bike than the mountain bike that the name applies to today.) I've always wanted to go places on my bike. I never imagined, though, that someday I'd be living in Vancouver and riding my bike all the way back here to visit! (This ride is part of a multi-day trip: https://ridewithgps.com/journal/8752)