Destination: Cañada Road, San Mateo County
Ride Cañada Road, picnic at the Pulgas Water Temple, and visit Filoli
This is part of a series of family-oriented day trip outings around the San Francisco Bay Area I look forward to enjoying with my kids once social distancing and shelter in place isn’t the norm any longer.
By Leslieakf — Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10647512
Social Isolation — Day 43
Don’t take things for granted.
I think a big thing I’ll take with me in our eventual post-isolation world is how I shouldn’t take things for granted. Maybe I’m even taking for granted that there will be a post-isolation world.
After carefully planning meals for the next two weeks, I realized today I was short one vegetable for tonight’s dinner, zucchini. In days prior to our current circumstances, I would quickly hop in the car, drive to a nearby market, and pick it up. And for so many reasons right now, that is something I simply don’t want to do. I can get by without zucchini (I sneak it in as a base layer for homemade pizza, yes I’m that parent), but I’m kicking myself for not picking it up the other day.
Another thing that came up in my news feed today was the assumption that once a person recovered from Covid-19, they would be immune to getting it again. Apparently that’s not definitively the case yet, and a bad assumption (read more in this NPR article). This is something most of us assumed would be the payoff if we happened to catch the Coronavirus and recover from Covid-19. Something I’ve taken for granted with the looming possibility of getting sick from the current pandemic.
Destination: Cañada Road
Ride Cañada Road
Picnic At The Pulgas Water Temple
Visit Filoli
Ride Cañada Road
By Robert Ashworth from Bellingham, WA., USA — Bicycle Sunday sign on Canada Road in San Mateo County, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66733105
I miss this ride. I haven’t been able to do this ride since I changed cars last year, my bike rack doesn’t fit properly any longer. You can either park near Edgewood road or near the intersection of Cañada Road and Highway 92 on most Sunday’s and the street is blocked off by Rangers for cyclists and others to enjoy.
My preference is to park by Edgewood road and head in from there. The one drawback here is that you share the road with cars till you pass Filoli. But it’s a good chance to teach some road safety. Once you pass Filoli, remember not to take up the whole road, there are many bikers out here on a nice day.
Pulgas Water Temple is roughly halfway along the route and is a good stop for a snack and a rest. If you are going to cycle the whole route, there is a decent climb as you approach the Cañada road/92 entrance. This side gets a lot more visitors and there is less parking, plus finishing your ride with this climb can be tough for younger riders, I prefer to keep it in the middle of the ride so we can turn back early if there is an issue.
Picnic At The Pulgas Water Temple
Picnic at the Pulgas Water Temple by Cody Tolmasoff
Completed in 1938, the Pulgas Water Temple was originally the terminus of the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct from the Sierras. Walking up to the temple, you could look down into a vault to a C shaped waterfall where the water would empty from Hetch Hetchy and spill into the Crystal Springs reservoir. At the time this was still running, it made a tremendous noise, all that water spilling through. However, a few years back, the SF Water Department diverted the water to a processing plant nearby and the Water Temple is now mostly decorative. Still a nice place for a picnic.
Visit Filoli
By Leonard G. on English Wikipedia; subseqently uploaded to commons via German Wikipedia by Sozi. — (Circuitous); originally uploaded from English Wikipedia to the German Wikipdia de.wikipedia, thence to Wikimedia Commons., CC SA 1.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1690400
Designed by Willis Polk for William Bowers Bourn II, one of California’s richest gold miners and president of the Spring Valley Water Company (later to become the SF Water Department), the Bourn family wanted a country estate and gardens. The name Filoli comes from William Bourn’s credo: “Fight for a just cause; Love your fellow man; Live a good life.”
Following the deaths of the Bourn’s in 1936, the estate was sold to Mr. William P. Roth and Mrs. Lurline Matson Roth, heiress to the Matson Navigation Company. The Roth family built Filoli’s botanic collections of camellias, rhododendrons, and azaleas, notably in the Woodland Garden, and added the serene swimming pool and the screened-in teahouse.
Mrs. Roth Donated the estate to the National Trust for Historic Preservation along with an endowment for Filoli to operate as a non-profit organization.
Filoli has served as a set to many movies and TV shows, most famously Dynasty in the 1980s.
It’s a beautiful house with some lovely gardens to tour. You could make a detour on your bike trip and enjoy the afternoon here, but I would probably prefer to make a day of it and come here on some other day.
Cody Tolmasoff is an author and publisher for Adventuring.in. He is a recovering programmer and a San Francisco native, raising two daughters, and regularly finding new adventures around the SF Bay Area. This article is an excerpt from an upcoming book, 52 San Francisco Bay Area Weekend Adventures, Day Trips With Your Kids!
Find him on Twitter @codyo, and read his most recent title Adventures in Getting Out on Amazon, filled with advice on successfully getting your family out for day trip adventures.
Originally published on Medium on 25 April 2020