Feeling badly de caffeinated this morning and knowing that we didn't have any milk or food we decided to get up and head out for an early run stopping for breakfast en route. You would think that this would be quite a simple thing to do given the choices at our disposal..............
...........We decided to go to the up town Los Gatos cafe as the down town one is always so busy. However we both thought that the other one knew exactly where it was.........so we ended up in down town with our name on the list and a 15 minute wait (even at 9am such is the popularity of the place). It was quite amusing standing outside watching a homeless guy sneaking past and helping himself to the outside coffee - provided for waiting customers - whilst the staff had their backs turned. He successfully had 3 cups, complete with cream and sugar, whilst we were there!
Seated at table, bottomless coffee cups filled and order given, all was well......except that the table was not to Martin's liking. People kept walking past.....imagine, in a busy cafe on a Saturday morning?! Unfortunately his obvious displeasure ruined my appetite and for probably the first time ever I needed a "to go" box for virtually all of my shrimp omelette and herb potatoes......not happy.
Next stop the very lovely Almaden Quicksilver County Park, my favourite place in the San Jose area. This time we went to the Mockingbird Hill entrance and headed up the Hacienda Trail....and up and up! We turned onto the Capehorn Pass Trail (which we had followed on our previous visit when we came up the Hacienda Trail from the other direction) and then on up to the English Camp - there are remains of a variety of structures left behind after 135 years of mining activity, the English Camp was the biggest concentration and was, interestingly, established by Cornish miners in the 1860's. There were intense mercury mining operations dating back to the Gold Rush Era and the mercury mined here was used in gold and silver mines in the Sierras to extract precious metals from the ore. The hills are apparently honeycombed with tunnels running thousands of feet, some below sea level, but all mining has long ceased and most of the tunnels have been sealed up. History apart the trails are great for running and we continued on up the Castillero Trail, which is at the "top" of the park.
Unfortunately the fast downhill running coming too soon after breakfast left me feeling slightly nauseous which in turn sapped my energy and the last few miles were a bit of a struggle. The route was lovely though, a single track twisting through the trees undulating sharply up and down - I was again struck by how similar this part of the park is to Exmoor. Eventually we turned down the Buena Vista trail and followed it back down to the parking lot - 10 miles done with a couple at fairly decent pace.
On the way back we stopped by my favourite store, Trader Joe's, to pick up some provisions and back at Erica Court we had lunch out on the front porch in the sun (we shared the rest of my breakfast which was delicious and I'm so glad I didn't stuff it all back earlier as usual!). We spent a couple of hours relaxing, reading and chatting with Sherry and Rich before the temperature started to drop a little in the late afternoon and we moved indoors.
I spent a couple of hours catching up on the time consuming business of blogging by which time Sherry had prepared yet another culinary delight and we went to bed feeling rested and ready for the next expedition.
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