amdilick

Today I took our Nissan Xterra for an oil change. That prompted me to check the odometer. It's just under 129,000 miles. For a car we've owned nearly 14 years that's actually kind of low. The normal range in the US is 12-15k per year. The low end of that at 14 years would be 168k. We averaged around 12k/yr for the first few years we owned the car, then we dropped to 8k/yr, then 5k. Now we're even lower. I think this car's only logged 2,000 miles since 9 months ago.

How did the car celebrate this milestone?



Ah, my old friend, the CHECK ENGINE light. 🙄 It came on today after the car had ignition problems at the oil change shop. Recently the car had started stalling out occasionally when sitting at idle.

We've dropped the car off with a local mechanic who'll look at it tomorrow. We'll see if he can root out what the problem might be. Hopefully it won't be one of those car mechanic equivalents of the doctor saying, "Get your affairs in order." I mean, I get it that even small repair could cost $2,000 today, which is probably a significant fraction of what this car is worth. But newer cars have gotten so expensive without really being compelling that we'd rather keep driving our 2011 model for a few more years.

After two days of feeling like a slug, mostly staying at home on my four-day weekend I had a definite not-slug day today. Hawk and I drove out to the Point Pinole Regional Shoreline park in Richmond, California for a hike. Mind you, Hawk is still getting over a bout of bronchitis, so doing this hike today was a big deal for her.

Point Pinole is not the kind of place you see on a map and say, "Ooh, let's go there!" That's mostly because it's not the kind of place you see on a map. It's an out-of-the-way park in in Richmond, California, a suburb of Oakland and San Francisco. It's behind a county juvenile detention facility, on the site of a former dynamite factory that closed up 65 years ago.

The fact that it's out of the way is kind of cool. That means it's not thronged with visitors even on a beautiful Saturday on a holiday weekend. Oh, there were plenty of people at the park with us today. But the ample parking lots were not full.

We started from the parking lot up a hill on a paved road and then over a bridge across train tracks. This was easily the worst part of the 5 or so miles we hiked. Fortunately it was also short. Once across the bridge we left the paved road and ambled down to a shoreline trail tracing around the west side of Point Pinole.



After the paved road being the worst part of the hike, this stroll along the western shore and then the bluffs above it was the best. From here we could see clear across the bay to the hillside of Marin County, including Mt. Tamalpais in the distance.

We traced along this side of the promontory for maybe two miles until we reached the tip of Point Pinole.



Here there's a fishing pier. It wasn't too busy with fishers today as, presumably, a) it's far from the nearest place where one can park, and b) it was very windy out on the pier when we walked even 50 feet out from the shore. Beyond the fishing pier, to the right in the photo above, are the remnants of an older pier. It was used by the Giant Company, the dynamite manufacturer previously located here. Cases of dynamite were transported on local rail out to the tip of the point, then on conveyor belts to small ships docked at the pier. The small ships would transport it to freighters out in the San Francisco Bay, from where it would be shipped to places around the Pacific Rim, from Mexico to Chile to the Philippines and beyond.

From here we hiked back on the other side of the triangular peninsula. The west side has saltwater marshes (i.e., swamps) along the coast, which are protected— and frankly wouldn't be fun to hike through anyway— so we didn't enjoy views from as close to the water.