Thursday, January 8, 2009

Walk #8: Calistoga; Mustard blooming


A quick post from the library of Calistoga. Fifteen minutes until closing.

These walks are wonderful! It seems that an hour walk is best. Enough time to process the day. Smell the flowers. And what flowers!

Climate change has come to the Napa Valley. The Mustard is blooming! Calistoga celebrates the yearly bloom of this nitrogen fixing plant in March. Here it is the first day of the second week of January and the Mustard blooms! I've lived out here for nigh on six years, and even in that time span I've noticed the Mustard blooming earlier every year.

Changes. What has a week of walking wrought? My mood is brighter. I have more energy at work. I sleep better.

And I'm two pounds heavier.

Yes, the ancient scale gave the news of two more pounds. I like to think it is muscle weight...but alas, I may also have to push myself away from the feed trough some.

Calistoga is like many towns. Their walking path is built where no one wants to build anything: along the sewage treatment plant. No smell on the walk. Just vineyards, and treatment ponds...some with Ducks frolicking in them, like a scene from a commercial for a waste treatment company. It is a combination walking/biking path.

Tourists are encouraged to take biking trips to the Napa Valley. They sell an idyllic scene of lazily riding your bike from one winery to another. The truth is the roads here are very unsafe for bikers. I know, I rode my bike on the world famous Silverado Trail for most of a year (until I fell off and broke both my arms). Most years some tourist is killed in a car versus bike crash. The roads don't have sufficient shoulders. The one bike path the Napa Valley does boast of is this one and a half mile segment in Calistoga.

Public space nowadays isn't the primo bit in town. We now think of public space as walks by sewage treatment plants.

It does make a nice walk though...

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