Where the sidewalk ends
Not even kidding about that title.
The community I run in is not yet finished. It has around 10,000 people. There’s one, small convenience store. There are a couple schools, but the school district only recently put up a building for its administrative office. A new high school is being built.
And there are a lot of roads to nowhere. There’s even a bridge to nowhere.
But my favorite part about Mountain House, not to be confused with Mountain View further into the San Francisco Bay Area, are all the sidewalks that just seem to end. That’s apparently what happens when construction isn’t yet done.
I always feel as if the conversation between construction workers goes a little something like this:
Worker 1: “Well, we’re almost out of concrete.”
Worker 2: “Ahhhh, we don’t need anymore. We’ll just end the sidewalk.”
Worker 1: “But what if someone walks off????”
Worker 2: “No worries, we’ll just put up a barricade. No danger in that.”
It’s not as if people can’t walk around the orange and white barricades. The bridge to nowhere I mentioned early (in reality, it will take the community over a main road once the area is completely built out), has a fence in front of it so no one will dare go up or on it. In reality, the bridge makes a great place to train with hill repeats. So people go around the fence. It’s not that hard. Let’s face it, people often ignore warning signs anyway.
It’s kind of humorous though when you get to one of these barricades. What exactly is it protecting me from? My run turning into a trail run? My feet hitting a hole? (That’s actually a serious concern, but I watch out.)
Funny thing, near one of the newer buildings, sometimes we actually run to where the sidewalk ends and turnaround.
Why do we not keep going? There’s no sidewalk. But there’s no barricade either.
