The Parks of Palo Alto

Salutations, recreational reader. Today we'll explore the many parks of Palo Alto.

Palo Alto is full of parks. There are at least 30 of them sprinkled around the city (note to self: at some point there's a blog post coming about the local government hierarchy here, where 'city' is pretty much equivalent to 'borough' in the UK; Palo Alto doesn't even come close to the UK definition of a city, it's really just a small town). But again, the US definition of 'park' is a pretty low bar and includes a bunch of things that might be called a 'garden' or maybe even a 'verge' in the UK.

As the lockdown lengthens and there isn't much to do, we've taken it upon ourselves to list out the many parks and tick them off as we visit. Well, everyone needs a hobby eh? So perhaps the smallest park we've been to so far was the charming Sarah Wallis Park, which was probably no more than 50 feet square. But consistently, parks here are well looked after and clean, even if they are on the small side:

There's quite a pleasant garden here, or perhaps more accurately a rockery, and a big tree or two. There's also a landscaped grassy knoll in case any passing assassins feel the need to take out a President.

This is at the small end of the parks, but your typical park here still isn't that big. You probably wouldn't get a football - sorry, soccer - pitch in most of them. What I don't have here is a picture of the legendary dog parks, which appear to be fenced off areas where you can... walk your dog. Not really sure why that needs a special area. Hmm. Anyway, we do like the parks; they bring some focus to a walk and it's nice to have them dotted around as a place to stop for 5 minutes before you go about your business. They make a welcome change from what is otherwise a pretty heavily urbanized environment here in the Bay Area (for our UK readers: in some ways the Bay reminds me of Leeds city centre, with massive dual carriageways inappropriately ripping their way through the heart of what could otherwise be fairly peaceful neighbourhoods; at least they had the sense to stick bits of the Leeds Inner Ring Road in cutting).

Two doors up from us is Johnson Park, and this week we've discovered there's some kind of air quality sensor there; handy when you're in the middle of wildfire season:

Mostly the air quality here hasn't been too bad, but as you can see it's far from perfect. The current score of 144 roughly means "it's quite hazy and there's a noticeable smell of smoke; you probably don't want to be out in it for too long". We've had a couple of days worse than this, but mostly it's been significantly better and once again we're lucky to be where we are.

So, we've ticked off something like a dozen parks so far; still 20 or so to go!