Just what have I been doing? Well, I managed to land a job in Pleasanton, not far from my island of Alameda. So for the last 8 months I've been doing the pharmaceutical validation gig and doing a lot of venturing outside of work since I have to travel. Most of my extracurricular activities have been focused on fixing and repairing guitar amplifiers and sharpening my luthier skills as I got very interested in building the instruments themselves. I plan to blog about these experiences on my other other blog, dnagent.blogspot.com.
So in the next few months, I'll be blogging about the sights, sounds, and perhaps the smells of the destinations I get to go and visit as I do my job. In the meantime, I'll blog about a destination that probably doesn't get a lot of coverage in travel blogs. I'll preface my take on this destination by telling you that someone made me realize that even though I'm not traveling to exotic and interesting locales and just sitting at my home base on Alameda island doesn't mean that it isn't exotic and interesting to people who have never been there.
Excellent point, Miss Caitlin, and I thank you for giving me some inspiration to blog about a place near and dear to me, the island city of Alameda, California.
As I'm practically an expert about the place since I've been a resident for the last 5 or so years, a single post won't be enough. In fact it may take several posts to do my island justice.
So, first off, an overview of Alameda.
It's an island. That in itself isn't that interesting, but what is interesting is that it didn't used to be. It was a peninsula connected to Oakland until 1902, when the marshy area south of what is now downtown was dredged in order to provide expanded shipping facilities. Most of the soil dredged to make the canal was used to connect Bay Farm Island to the the mainland, and keeps this name despite no longer being an island.
There are three bridges from Oakland (Park Street, Fruitvale Avenue, and High Street Bridges), as well as the two one-way Posey and Webster Street Tubes leading into Oakland's Chinatown. At the southern end of the island the Bay Farm Island Bridge allows access to Bay Farm Island. There's also the Bay Farm Island Bicycle Bridge, which happens to be the only pedestrian/bicycle-only drawbridge in the United States.
I used to live in an apartment near the Webster Tunnel and Posey Tube, but just recently moved in to a nice Victorian behind Little John Park. It was built in 1895 making it 116 years old, which is old for an American home, but barely a teenager when compared to the 400 year old home I was staying in when I was visiting friends in London's Kensington area.
You've probably seen my previous posts about Memorial Day activities on board the USS Hornet. The Hornet is permanently docked here as a floating museum. Inside, you'll learn about her history as an aircraft carrier in the Pacific during World War 2, and the roles it played during the Vietnam War and the Apollo missions to the moon.
The Hornet is located on the Northern part of Alameda island in an area that used to be a huge Naval Air Station. It's probably more famous these days for being the place where the Mythbusters go to blow things up, like a hot water heater whose safety devices had either been removed or circumvented. They did this little experiment just outside of the gym I go to that occupies a former Navy hangar.
That's just a quick overview of some of Alameda's many charms. Next posting: when Alameda was the Coney Island of the West.
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