Backroad Exploration, Local Treasures
In my previous post, Top 10 Things to do Between Trips, “local exploration” was 2nd on the list. Exploring the local (and not-so-local) backroads has been a favorite hobby of mine over the last 15 years, so I thought I should delve into it a little more here.
No matter where I have lived, I’ve always been attracted to interesting locations off the beaten path. Malls, shopping centers, and similar urban chain locations are what attract most people, but they’ve never held much interest to me. In fact, I like to say that I am allergic to malls. But I enjoy mom & pop stores, traditional old downtown areas, rural backroads, and hidden gems. I like seeing the history of an area too.
Exploring the local backroads became a common way of spending my lunch break at various jobs. Rather than sit at my desk or at a fast food place eating my lunch all the time, I found it was much more fun to get out and actually do something. To be sure, there were still plenty of business lunches and ones at my desk, but it’s nice to get away when it’s an option.
It’s also true that most people are totally oblivious to their local offerings, or at least the ones that are even slightly obscure. I’ve discovered that people are very often totally unaware of parks that are in their own neighborhoods, much less a few miles away. And more obscure sights? Few indeed will know of those.
Here in the south SF Bay Area, we have all sorts of things that are guaranteed to bring surprised reactions when you tell someone about them. There are seasonal waterfalls that tens of thousands of residents are unaware of, probably within easy walking or biking distance of their homes. More inexplicably, there are slabs of the Berlin Wall in a small industrial park. There’s a miniature, functional oil derrick in the parking lot of a real estate company. There, it used to extract a couple of barrels of oil per day. There’s a New England clapboard house that was cut from lumber and shipped from the east coast around Cape Horn back around 1851. There are mine shafts, trellises, hundred year-old steam train water tanks, and mummies. The list goes on and on.
So as I said in my Top 10 List, in my experience I have found that exploring the local backroads can be very rewarding. If you can’t make that epic road trip to Moab or Death Valley or Baja or whatever, for whatever reason, the local option is usually a good fall-back. Whether you’re short on time or money or your 4×4 needs some work, or your kid is in school, or even if you just need a short shakedown run, you can probably still get away for a few hours if you really want to. And until you’ve seen it all, who knows what you’ll find?
Which brings us to New Almaden. Once a small mining town, it’s now just a tiny, obscure corner of sprawling San Jose. While much of San Jose is very urban, with nearly a million people, New Almaden remains blissfully rural and untouched to a great degree. After the traditional post-trip letdown from my Mountain Rendezvous 2013 road trip set in, I reacted by immediately making plans for a “Sunday drive” around New Almaden with the family. It would only cost a few bucks worth of gas, and a couple of hours of our time. From previous exploration, I was very familiar with a lot of interesting history there, so I’d act as tour guide for my wife and daughter.
Below you’ll see the link to a gallery of the photos that I took on our visit, with descriptive captions. New Almaden’s roots as an old mining town are evident everywhere you turn, but there are the unexpected treasures too. The only place to eat there happens to also be one of the most respected French restaurants in all of California. There’s the old graveyard, with a road plowed through the middle, and with part of a person buried there. There’s a memorial to a fallen soldier from our recent wars, who is probably a household name to many of you. And more.
So there you have it. Of course, New Almaden is just one unique location out of endless possibilities. Local exploration can – and does – produce unexpected rewards, whether they be historic, scenic, quirky, or just good food and people. I’d encourage you to get out there and give it a try sometime.
New Almaden Photo Tour Gallery
On a related note from the past, I have two older galleries which are collections of photos from random day trips around my area: Day Trips Gallery 1 and Gallery 2. These have been up for a few years now but they contain a wider variety of interesting things I’ve seen in my area..