Ed R. Levin County Park
Drive to the Coast
“It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.” – Ferris Bueller talking about a Ferrari in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
Something San Jose has a lot more of these days is exotic sports cars. You can even rent them. If you have a chance to cruise around with a friend in a Ferrari, I highly recommend it. There are lots of types of experiences in this world. I like many of them and sometimes squishing them together. So, for example: start in San Jose, take an adventure to the coast, a cup of coffee, some beautiful nature, great conversation with a friend, and wrap up the curvy road sways with the art- visual/tactile/mechanical/aural- of a Ferrari. That’s a pretty fantastic day’s experience.
Chitactac-Adams County Park
Chitactac-Adams county park is a remarkable place. For hundreds of years this was the home of Native peoples. We can say that about all of California. But here, you can touch…
Those, in the picture above, are mortars ground into the rock from hundreds of years ago, made by the people who lived here along the Uvas Creek, grinding food from the land around… and you can touch them! There are many of them and it is wonderful to imagine the many hours of their use, the people who were here before in the same space as I occupy now, leaning over these bowls in the rock, and touching history.
On the annual family day, you can do crafts, watch a Native American ceremony, play traditional games, and learn. My children loved making jewelry from pine nuts that they turned into beads by grinding off the two sides and cleaning out the hole through the center.
It is a beautiful place with so much nature to look at. Some of the branches are amazing, like lightning bolts, jerking horizontally through the air above. I try, but the pictures below don’t do the lightening branches justice, try and marvel at them in person if you get the chance.
Hundreds of years with people living here along the river (the Chitactac part of the park name), nearly 100 years with an old school house (the Adams part of the park name), and then the last hundred years, until the recent fences to protect the petroglyphs went up, as a favorite jumping-off-into-the-river point for the local children. Remnants of the rope swing can still be seen, and adults can still be found who will talk of their youth and jumping off the big rock into the creek.
Japantown Murals
This service station is a perfect slice of Japantown in San Jose; history meets today, still running and valuable, with bits from all times in between, in a blend rare and wonderful to find.
Spiderweb – Trellis Edifice
Harker High School
This performing arts building has a beautiful metal scale skin; like a metal dragon turned into a building, the scales overlap and reflect the sun.
RAMAC Park
At the base of the lamp post, and in several other places at the park and in the surrounding area, you can see the tile homage to the original and historical buildings that once stood here adorned with a tile mural, here where the disk drive was developed and so much more was invented at the one time San Jose IBM campus.
RAMAC Park is named after the first disk drive system. RAMAC stands for Random Access Method of Accounting and Control. It’s first level of development and invention occurred at the first California IBM laboratory in a rented building near the De Anza Hotel in San Jose. When the the new 190 acre IBM campus was ready on Cottle Ave., the lab moved to this south San Jose location and went on to innovate in big ways.
If you look around the park area today there is very little, but some, of the original tile mural work still up and visible. Other areas have covered the mural work to protect it, hopefully for a good and public purpose in the future.
Blossom Hill intersection
Gladiola
The Alameda Murals
So many murals down one alleyway off of The Alameda. This was a happy find and I spent a lot of time enjoying these. At the end of the alley and parking lots, was a wonderful smell or flowers. There were roses and jasmine in the vicinity. To smell the roses I ended up next to this fence. I like this fence, I don’t know why I liked it so, but I think it was the aged wood and older San Jose home with the extra detail and color, and of course, the smell of roses all around it.
